Do Innovative Work Practices and Use of Information and Communication Technologies Motivate Employees?

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12173
• Published date: 01 April 2017
• Date: 01 April 2017
• Author: Ludivine Martin

Do Innovative Work Practices and Use of

Information and Communication Technologies

Motivate Employees?

*

LUDIVINE MARTIN

I investigate the impact of innovative work practices and information and commu-

nication technologies (ICT) use on employees’motivations. The paper provides

new and interesting results on how firms can build a motivational environment.

Within an original instrumenting framework, I modify what previous analyses

reveal about quality circle and training participation. The results confirm the posi-

tive role of work practices such as teamwork, quality norms, formal appraisals,

management recognition, and family-friendly policies. The ICT that most con-

tributed to the development of a motivational environment are those that facilitate

access to information and knowledge such as workflow, Internet, and e-mail.

Introduction

To increase the performance of a firm, employers need to design an organi-

zation of work that motivates employees. In a long-standing tradition within

labor economics, firms exist in a large part to provide the proper incentives to

obtain the optimal provision of employees’effort. To reduce the agency prob-

lem the employer resorts to pay-for-performance and closer monitoring with

sanctions when substandard work is observed. The development of human

resources management literature permits one to broaden the analysis of the

human resources tools employers can use to motivate their employees. In the

literature, there is no consensus on the scope of human resources work prac-

tices and this paper analyzes a large range of practices covering high perfor-

mance work organization practices (such as teamwork, quality management),

high-commitment employment practices, or human resources management

*The author’saffiliations are LISER—Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, Luxembourg,

and CREM (UMR CNRS 6211), Rennes/France. E-mail : ludivine.martin@liser.lu. This research is part of

the TWAIN project supported by the Fonds National de la Recherche, Luxembourg (contract FNR/C11/LM/

1196209) and by core funding from LISER (formerly CEPS/INSTEAD) from the Ministry of Higher Educa-

tion and Research of Luxembourg. The author is grateful to Francis Green, Nicolas Poussing, Karina Door-

ley, editor Steven Raphael, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on previous versions

of the paper.

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practices (personnel policies such as training, consultancy, appraisal, and fam-

ily-friendly policies). The work environment is shaped by these work practices

but also by the diffusion of information and communication technologies

(ICT; such as enterprise resource planning [ERP], access to the Internet, and

so on). The literature underlines that technologies investments and work prac-

tices impact the structure of the firm (Bloom et al. 2014, Garicano 2000; Gari-

cano and Rossi-Hansberg 2006) and improve the performance measured at the

firm level (e.g., Black and Lynch 2001; Bresnahan, Brynjolfsson, and Hitt

2002), the industry level (e.g., Jorgenson and Stiroh 2000), and the country

level (Jorgenson 2001).

These positive effects of technologies and work practices on performance

underlined in the literature are often explained by assuming positive effects on

employees’motivations but most of the time only related concepts are ana-

lyzed. An important body of work does indeed reveal that a well-designed

work organization permits an increase in individual job performance through

the encouragement of positive employee attitudes such as job satisfaction,

organizational commitment, or citizenship (see Boxall and Macky [2009] for a

review). In most of the existing literature, the focus is put on innovative work

practices and technologies are largely neglected (e.g., Gallie, Felstead, and

Green 2001; Godard 2001; Mohr and Zoghi 2008; White and Bryson 2013).

When ICT are introduced only a small range of the ICT currently available at

work is studied (such as computer and Internet in Askenazy and Caroli 2010;

Cappelli and Neumark 2001; Martin and Omrani 2015). Moreover, the poten-

tial reverse causation due to behavioral correlation between, on one hand, the

voluntary participation in innovative work practices and the use of ICT and,

on the other hand, employee attitudes are, to my knowledge, never taken into

account.

As motivations are the drivers of employees’performance it is important to

analyze motivations as such directly. The relationships among the innovative

work practices, ICT, and motivations are little studied and when studied the

measure of motivations is aggregated (Godard 2001) or limited to certain

aspects of motivations, such as intrinsic ones (Martin 2011). This work is, to

my knowledge, the first that assesses the whole continuum of employees’

motivations as defined by social psychologists following the original work of

Deci (1975). This continuum of motivations draws on the Motivation at Work

Scale (MAWS) developed by Gagn

e et al. (2010) following the Self-Determi-

nation Theory (SDT) of Gagn

e and Deci (2005). Motivations are the drivers of

employees to make an effort and to maintain this effort until they achieve the

goals fixed by the employer. Employees exert effort because of the tasks them-

selves (intrinsic motivations), because of values and goals shared with the

264 / LUDIVINE MARTIN