Work motivation and journalists in Taiwan and the US: an integration of theory and culture

Abstract

This study applies work motivation theories from the organizational sciences and a cultural variable to a comparative analysis of daily newspaper journalists in Taiwan and the US. The journalists were compared on measures of job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intentions. ‘Culture’ was measured by a collectivism tendency index. Regression analyses revealed the sharpest cultural differences for job satisfaction and theoretic predictors of it. Similarities between the journalists were found for commitment and intentions of quitting (turnover). This study's findings add to and advance research of journalists' work motivation. Its unique methodological approach serves as a guide to future research of the subject.

Keywords:

• journalists' job satisfaction
• journalists' work motivation
• Taiwan
• US

Acknowledgements

The study was conducted with a grant from the Center for University Scholars at Jackson State University, Jackson, MS, USA.

Notes

1. A recent search of the Social Sciences Citation Index for the keyword phrase ‘job satisfaction’ returned 6807 studies dating to the 1950s. Among them, less than 1% (n = 19) were specific to journalists. The earliest work on journalists dates to the late 1970s.

2. The other three are ‘task identity’, defined as the extent to which workers see a product or project through from its beginning to end; ‘skill variety’, or the chance to perform different tasks; and ‘feedback’ from supervisors and others about one's job performance.

3. Due to the lack of audited circulation figures for the Taiwanese newspapers at the time of the study, the stratified sampling procedure used for the US sample was not applicable to the Taiwanese sample. Instead, a convenience sample was drawn from Taiwanese newspaper journalists. One of the authors contacted five Taiwanese newspapers of varying circulation sizes and asked his contacts at the newspapers to distribute questionnaires to and collect completed responses from journalists at the newspapers.

4. For both samples, the survey was initially administered in the later part of 2005. It ended in early 2006, after a series of reminder communications to lagging respondents.

5. For the Taiwan sample: 40.2 mean age, 45% female, 98% college graduates, and 67% married. For the US sample: 42.2 mean age, 37% female, 94% college graduates, and 55% married.

6. There is precedence for a single-pole measure of I-C. Collectivism-only indices are used nearly as often as individualism-only indices in studies of the job satisfaction and organizational commitment of non-newsworkers. We chose a collectivism-only index as it implicitly posits that cultural type (and Taiwan broadly) as the norm against which (individualistic) US journalists were measured.

7. They note that standardized betas allow researchers to compare the effects of predictor (independent) variables on criterion (dependent) variables.

8. The anecdotal evidence was gleaned from one of the authors’ informal interviews with members of the Taiwanese press.