تئوری حق تعیین سرنوشت و جستجوی کار شاغل

Self Determination Theory (SDT) predicts that employees who use controlled motivation to search for alternate (better) work are less successful than their counterparts who use autonomous motivation. Using Australian labour market data, we find strong support for SDT. We find that workers who face externally regulated pressures (pressure arising from involuntary part-time or casual labour contracts) to search for alternate employment are less likely to find better work, than workers who use autonomous motives to search for work. Our findings suggest that labour market policies trending towards ‘labour market flexibility/deregulation’ – which provide workers with controlled motives to search for work – will contribute to workers cycling through spells of insecure employment and possibly intermittent spells of unemployment with no realistic prospect of career development.

In 1994, the Organisation for Economic Co-ordination and Development (OECD) made various recommendations to “increase wage and labour cost flexibility” and “reform employment security provision” in an attempt to reduce unemployment. OECD (1994) claimed that a more flexible, deregulated labour market would entice employers to create more employment and hence lead to lower unemployment. This induced most OECD member countries to promote labour market policies which (among others) reduced job security of employees. However, when the OECD evaluated its reform agenda in 2006, it concluded: ‘... the reduction of unemployment does not correlate very strongly with reform intensity’ ( OECD, 2006: 69) indicating its reform package had not been a success – see also Mitchell and Muysken (2008) for a comprehensive critique of the OECD Jobs Study reforms at the macroeconomic level. This paper will look at the consequences of the OECD reform agenda at the micro-level. We will use insights from Self Determination Theory (SDT) to test the consequences of this climate of reduced job security on job search behaviour and job satisfaction of workers (for an extensive overview of SDT see Deci & Ryan, 2000). When applied to the labour market, SDT claims that there are two broad motives why workers may search for alternative employment: (a) autonomous motivation which refers to activities that the individual engages in freely or for external reasons that have been internalised; and (b) controlled motivation which arises from externally regulated pressures. SDT argues that autonomous motivation is more likely to lead to a successful outcome (find alternative better employment) than controlled motivation and therefore more likely to promote job satisfaction following a job change. Clearly, reduced job security is an externally regulated pressure that may prompt controlled job search motivation, because the employee’s job security is at stake. The OECD (2001: 14) concluded that in terms of labour market policies, Australia ‘... has been among the OECD countries complying best with this Strategy.’. Therefore, we decide to test the micro-level consequences of the OECD’s reform agenda in the context of the Australian labour market. We will draw on data from the first eleven waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics Australia (HILDA) data set. Though SDT has been applied to the labour market before (see Vansteenkiste et al., 2004, Vansteenkiste et al., 2005 and Vansteenkiste et al., 2007), that research focuses mainly on the unemployed. Instead, we focus on employees searching for work and their motivations. Since, the unemployed are at the bottom of the job ladder, they do not face substantial downside risks from not searching, as opposed to employees, who may lose their job. Consequently, we expect effects of externally regulated pressures to lead to stronger controlled behavioural effects for employees than for the unemployed. If SDT has explanatory power then we should see that reduced job security stimulates more externally regulated job search. We should also observe that such job search will be less successful and if successful associated with lower increments in job satisfaction following job change. The paper will first briefly describe SDT in the context of the labour market followed by a discussion of the increased precariousness of employment in Australia. Section 2 will describe our data sources and hypotheses, while Section 3 discusses the methods we use to test our hypotheses. Section 4 contains the results, while Section 5 presents a discussion of our results and concluding remarks. 1.1. Self Determination Theory Self Determination Theory posits that to achieve psychological well-being, people have to fulfil several needs (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Three broad categories of such needs are identified: the need for competence, relatedness and autonomy. Paid employment contributes to the satisfaction of all three needs simultaneously. That is, workers can show their competence in a job; develop relations and networks at work to address the relatedness need; and employment is a means to generate income which provides the worker a route towards autonomy. Once employed, climbing the job ladder addresses the needs for competence and autonomy. Consequently, SDT argues that people work towards goals that enable them to achieve needs satisfaction, which – if successful – leads to positive psychological outcomes. There is ample evidence that employment or career advancement indeed contributes to psychological wellbeing (see for example Warr et al., 1988 and Winefield et al., 1991). However, SDT claims that the type of motivation used to work towards goal achievement crucially impacts on the likelihood that goal achievement is accomplished. Consequently, SDT may provide insights into why some job seekers are more successful than others, which – as we will see – may include the institutional setting in which job search takes place. SDT distinguishes autonomous and controlled motivation – see Deci and Ryan (2000). Autonomous motivation can be intrinsic, identified or integrated. Intrinsic motivation refers to activities people freely engage in; identified or integrated motivation refers to external reasons to engage in an activity that people have internalised, i.e. the motivation is considered autonomous. Consequently, the locus of control is internal for autonomous motivation, as opposed to controlled motivation, which has an external locus of control. That is, the reason for engagement in an activity is external and not integrated. Applied to the case of employed job search, the employed job seeker who searches for other jobs because she enjoys attempting to find out the value of her skills in an alternative work setting is intrinsically motivated. The employed job seeker who for example searches for alternate work to expand her career uses identified or integrated motivation. However, the employed job seeker who searches for alternate work, because her present job is at risk, does not search because she dislikes her present job, but because external forces (potential job loss) force her to search. The vast body of empirical literature in this area of psychology provides ample evidence that (a) both autonomous and controlled motivation drive people to set and strive for goals in order to satisfy needs, but (b) that people with autonomous motivation are more successful in achieving these goals than people led by controlled motives and hence more successful in satisfying needs with better psychological wellbeing as an outcome. Empirical studies have tested SDT in various settings, including education, sport and health care (see Williams et al., 1998, Sarrazin et al., 2002 and Vallerand and Bissonnette, 1992 as representative examples). Though job search has been widely researched in both psychological and economic literature (see Kanfer, Wanberg, & Kantrowitz, 2001 for a meta-analysis), studies linking SDT to job search are surprisingly rare. Vansteenkiste, Lens, De Witte, De Witte, and Deci (2004) found that the long-term unemployed who were autonomously motivated were more likely to search for work than the unemployed utilising controlled motivation. In a later paper, Vansteenkiste, Lens, De Witte, and Feather (2005) also study job search behaviour of the unemployed and find similar results. However, they do not find a positive relationship between psychological well-being and type of motivation (either autonomous or controlled). The authors suggest this may be explained by the outcome of the job search process, which is beyond their analysis. That is, the autonomously motivated unemployed may derive more satisfaction from search for employment than the unemployed utilising controlled motivation. However, not succeeding in finding employment will lead to more dissatisfaction for the autonomously motivated unemployed (see Vansteenkiste et al., 2007), leaving the overall effect of type of motivation on well-being ambiguous. Our analysis can be related to the findings of Vansteenkiste et al., 2004 and Vansteenkiste et al., 2005 in two ways. Vansteenkiste et al. (2004) explain their observation by assuming that the unemployed who use controlled motivation to search for jobs, may – after several fruitless efforts – develop an autonomous motivation to remain unemployed and stop searching, which enables them to better accept their situation. An alternative explanation of this observation might be that because the unemployed are at the bottom of the job ladder, they have little to lose by not searching for employment, especially in countries with relatively strong social security systems (like Belgium – the study area of Vansteenkiste et al., 2004). Controlled motivations may be too weak to prompt job search. Therefore we decide to move one step up the job ladder and focus on job seekers who do face significant potential losses from not searching: the employed job seekers who are at risk of losing their current job. Second, we can solve the ambiguity in Vansteenkiste et al. (2005), since we will not only relate the job search decision to type of motivation but also – once a positive decision has been detected – to the outcome of job search. SDT states that job seekers who are autonomously motivated to search for employment are more likely to be successful than those driven by controlled motivation. We will test that hypothesis. We are aware of one study that looked at employed job search. Halvari, Vansteenkiste, Brorby, and Karlsen (2013) apply SDT to the decision of part-time workers to search for fulltime work. However, their data on motivation are based on self-report, which may artificially strengthen their results. Our proxies for autonomous and controlled motivation are based on more objective measures – as we outline in the next paragraphs. 1.2. Trends towards increased labour market precariousness The deregulation of the Australian labour market has manifested in increased precariousness in the labour market. Precarious work has two dimensions which are measured systematically: involuntary part-time employment and casual employment. We use these indicators to show the incidence of precariousness of the labour market and its development over time. In their analysis of the trends in precarious work Abhayaratna, Andrews, Nuch, and Podbury (2008) show that Australia ranks second across the OECD in terms of the proportion of part-time workers in total employment. Mitchell and Muysken (2008) find that the trend of the incidence of part-time employment has clearly been upwards, from 15% in 1978 to 30% of total employment in 2010. However, there is also a clear indication that the recessions pushed the trend growth upwards. An observation which is relevant to our analysis is that a substantial number of part-time workers prefer more hours of work per week as a percentage of total part-time workers. This is illustrated in Fig. 1, which shows that the share of involuntary part-time workers fluctuates around seven per cent of all employees since 1990. Consequently, about seven per cent of all employees would like to work more hours, but cannot fulfil that preference. We will argue that these workers face externally regulated pressures (presumably financial pressures) to search for additional work either in their current or a new job. The rising part-time to total employment ratio and the increased incidence of underemployment has also been accompanied by a rise in the importance of casual employment. This trend has been well documented in the Australian context (see for example, Campbell, 1996, Campbell, 2001, Junor, 2001 and Pocock et al., 2004). The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) defines casual employment as all employees that do not enjoy access to paid holiday and sick leave. Casual workers tend to be part-time and dominated by female workers in retail trade and in accommodation, cafes and restaurants. The jobs tend to be low-skilled and low-paid. Campbell (2001: 68) found the proportion of workers who were considered to be casual in 1982 was 13.3%. In Fig. 1 one sees that the proportion increased to 23.7% thirty years later. Not only do casual workers miss access to paid leave and sick leave, they are also excluded from some of the other legislative protections (including unfair dismissal). Consequently, they can lose their job with very little advance notice. Additionally, Pocock et al., (2004) found that a large proportion of casual jobs were precarious with respect to the predictability of earnings, the hours offered, the opportunities for skill development, low union representation, and an increased vulnerability to occupational health and safety hazards. We will – similar to involuntary part-timers – argue that these workers utilise controlled motives to search for work.

We have applied SDT to the field of employed job search, which is a field with strong externally regulated pressures in place in industrialised countries like Australia. As predicted, workers who search for a job without externally regulated pressures are more likely to find alternative jobs with subsequent augmented job satisfaction. Employees facing externally regulated pressures are not per se less likely to find alternative employment, but the fact that they do not transit to better jobs is indicative of the failure of contemporary labour market policies applied in OECD countries like Australia. The findings also accord with predictions from dual labour market (DLM) theory – Doeringer and Piore, 1971 and Piore, 1975. DLM theory argues that the labour market is segmented into a Primary Labour Market (PLM) and a Secondary Labour Market (SLM). The PLM worker who is typically employed in a secure internal labour market structure which provides for career advancement will use search activity to enhance her career aspirations, i.e. autonomous motivation. Conversely, the SLM worker may search for different reasons especially given the precariousness of their employment. Search thus may not be motivated by potential employment improvement, but might, rather, be fuelled by fear of future job loss, i.e.: controlled motivation. The two markets are separated by rigidities which inhibit mobility across them. Accordingly, if a worker becomes ‘trapped’ into the SLM, access to the better outcomes in the PLM becomes severely limited if not intractable. SDT would argue that lack of upward mobility from the SLM is not necessarily a result of rigidities but of externally regulated search motivation. The applicability of SDT to labour market analysis provides important new ways of appraising the current policy framework which has emphasised activism and deregulation. The implementation of the OECD Job Study agenda has increased the degree of job insecurity in labour markets. There has been a marked increase in the degree of precariousness and job instability over the last two decades in most economies. The application of SDT to this phenomenon tells us that the supply-side labour market policy framework has contributed to workers cycling through spells of insecure employment and possibly intermittent spells of unemployment with no realistic prospect of career development. In other words, the stated goals of the OECD activist strategy have not been fulfilled in practice when we consider the fortunes of the vulnerable workers in the labour market. This cohort was thought to be beneficiaries of the new approach to training and job placement. Our study suggests that they have not gained better jobs through increased (forced) search activity.