Employees' motiuation for tailing on leadership positions: A quantitatiue study on how Leader-Member relationships (LMX) and job satisfaction influence employees' motiuation for upward career transitions into leadership positions

Abstract

This master thesis looks at employees’ motivation for taking on leadership positions. We argue that this is important for leadership recruitment and to ensure effective leadership which again will influence the performance of the organization. We researched this topic by looking at well-known work-related predictors like leader-member relationship (LMX) and job satisfaction, and how these influence different subscales of motivation derived from self-determination theory. To our knowledge, this specific type of motivation (motivation to take on leadership positions) has not previously been explored in the same way as we did. The question we seek to answer in this paper is: “How does job satisfaction and leader-member relationship affect employees' motivation for upward career transitions into leadership positions?”

A cross-sectional research design was chosen for this paper. Accordingly, we used a quantitative self-reported survey with respondents from U.K. We found a positive and significant relationship between LMX and intrinsic motivation. In terms of our hypotheses, this was our only significant finding, meaning we did not find support for the remaining 10 hypotheses. However, although not significant, we had other interesting findings which we elaborate on in detail in our discussion. For example, when we looked at job satisfaction and different motivational subscales, we found that job satisfaction followed the hypothesized pattern of Ryan and Deci’s (2020) taxonomy of motivation.

We believe the contributing factor is highly present since we explore a specific type of motivation and not just general work motivation. Additionally, we do not use predicting factors that are inherent in the employee, e.g., personality, which often is the case in existing research involving this type of leadership research. This together makes this paper valuable for organizational psychology and especially leadership recruitment. The research presented in this thesis is not without limitations, and important methodological and theoretical limitations are discussed.