It's not for the money; it's the motives - The mediating role of endogenous motivations on IT employees' entrepreneurial behavior

The traditional task of IT departments is currently undergoing a fundamental change from being a functional part of business, to playing a more strategic role in the development of new products (Bharadwaj 2013). The success of this shift is based on the individual employee’s willingness to go along with this new approach. But how can we influence employees’ individual entrepreneurial motivation and encourage them to develop new features? To answer this question we applied self-determination theory and different process constructs to build a model that explains how the workplace must be designed to encourage employees to work more innovatively. We collected a sample of 354 questionnaires to evaluate our model. The results indicate that job-design constraints in combination with the internal perceived locus of causality (PLOC) provide a starting point for managers to reshape their IT departments. This paper provides the necessary insights to overcome this new challenge.

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