What motivates healthcare workers? Using latent profile analysis to understand healthcare workers' motives and their relationships with work outcomes
Date
2023
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Abstract
Healthcare workers (HCWs) are an integral part of the U.S. healthcare system. Despite their importance, healthcare organizations often struggle to attract, retain, and manage these workers due to various challenges inherent in this type of work. Human resource management interventions that target HCWs' motivation have been proposed as a means to help address these issues. However, HCW motivation is complex and multifaceted and prior work has not thoroughly accounted for how multiple motives influence HCWs' work. The current research seeks to understand how various HCW motives identified in the literature relate to each other and to important work outcomes. Specifically, I used latent profile analysis to identify distinct HCW motive profiles, evaluated the degree to which each profile was characterized by extrinsic or intrinsic motivation or amotivation, and then examined whether these profiles were differentially related to client-related burnout, work-related burnout, turnover, job satisfaction, meaning in life, and job performance. My results revealed three latent profiles: an incentive-driven profile, an altruism-driven profile, and a broadly-driven profile. The incentive-driven profile displayed low intrinsic motivation and was associated with the worst outcomes. The altruism-driven profile displayed moderate intrinsic motivation and was associated with better outcomes than the incentive-driven profile but worse outcomes than the broadly-driven profile. The broadly-driven profile displayed high intrinsic motivation and was associated with the best outcomes. All profiles displayed high extrinsic motivation and low amotivation. This study's results demonstrated that HCWs who reported multiple motives for engaging in their work fared better than those who reported only one or two motives, and that a higher degree of internalization (i.e., intrinsic motivation) was associated with better outcomes. This study also found, counterintuitively, that being driven solely by altruistic motives was detrimental to HCWs. Implications for research and practice as well as future direction are discussed.
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Subject
latent profile analysis
work motivation
motives
healthcare workers