specifically for the workplace context rather than being general theories of
motivation applied to the work context (Jex and Britt 2008: 235, 256). These
theories will be discussed in Section 4.3.1 where the identifed hospitality
motivation studies are introduced.
4.1.1 Making sense of work motivation
The three reviews of work motivation covered here (Korman et al. 1977; Pinder
1984; and Latham and Pinder 2005) highlight the variety of differing
conceptualisations that have been employed in the work motivation field. Since
the application of Maslow’s needs-hierarchy to work contexts and the wide-
ranging implementation of Vroom’s (1964) expectancy-value meta-theory, work
motivation theory has tended to focus on more specific areas. Ambrose and Kulik
(1999) have gone as far as to describe this as the ‘abandonment’ of the use of
motivation:
Organizational behavior research has largely abandoned the concept of
“motivation” and has replaced this broad concept with more specific
measures of employee behavior... Research on motivation during the
1990s was largely done through the “back-door.”
(Ambrose and Kulik 1999: 278)The wide range of theoretical approaches which have been employed by
researchers to understand work motivation make it difficult, or even impossible,
to reconcile these into a unified theoretical framework and – indeed - there is
neither an “agreed-upon integrative theory of motivation” nor a “universally
accepted way of presenting the various approaches to motivation” (Mitchell and
Daniels 2002: 227). Because work motivation research is located within the
’parental’ discipline of I/O (Industrial and Organisational) Psychology (see e.g.
Borman et al. 2003; Millward 2005; Jex and Britt 2008) and more specifically
within the area of Organisational Behaviour (OB) (Alliger 1992: 9), the chapter
turns now to examine the I/O Psychology and Organisational Behaviour fields to
seek insights in order to formulate an organising framework to help inform the
development of specific hypotheses for the research design.