Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-15-2015
Abstract
Recent research predicts that by 2016, 47% of the workforce will perform work from a remote location. This study contributes new knowledge to remote workforce management by hypothesizing that personality traits (intrinsic motivation, grit, and impression management) and job engagement have direct positive and significant relationships with employee productivity. To address this gap, we conducted a quantitative study of 300 employees (remote and non remote) who are currently actively employed by different kind of companies. Three major findings emerged from our study. First, our research demonstrates that intrinsic motivation to work remotely is a critical characteristic for remote workers to be productive. And contrary to our expectation, our study also reveals that work engagement is not highly correlated to productivity, and although there is a high correlation between Intrinsic Motivation and work engagement, we found that work engagement in this case does not impact productivity. Lastly, despite the theory that exists to explain the crucial role that Grit plays in individual success, in this case, we found that Grit does not have any significant effects directly or indirectly to Productivity. One of the key implications of our findings for management and human resources leaders is that in addition to careful assessment of technical knowledge or competencies, which is being the traditional selection process, employers should ensure that they have a robust selection process to exclusively understand why the employee is motivated to work remotely, which may in return, result in creating a much more productive remote workforce.
Keywords
remote work, personality and traits, intrinsic motivation, grit, impression management, productivity
Rights
© The Author(s). This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Department/Center
Design & Innovation
Recommended Citation
Martinez-Amador, Josefina, "Remote Worker Characteristics: The Positive Relationship of Intrinsic Motivation in Remote Worker Productivity" (2015). Student Scholarship. 355.
https://commons.case.edu/studentworks/355