Are intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation and organisational identity always beneficial to the organisation? The different effects of black and grey corruption

ABSTRACT

This paper examines intrinsic and extrinsic motivation characteristics and analyses the differences between the two types of motivation on black and grey corruption. This study evaluated public official survey data based on theoretical discussions and analysed the effects of intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation and organisational identity. The data of this study are drawn from a survey of perceptions among South Korean public servants working in the central government. In all, 1,400 public servants participated, and questionnaires were sent proportionally to the number of civil servants in each ministry, taking account of rank, age and gender. Ordinary least squares regression analysis is used to check the hypotheses. The analysis finds that both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation had the effect of suppressing black corruption. In the case of grey corruption; however, intrinsic motivation suppressed grey corruption, while extrinsic motivation increased it in the opposite direction. In addition, the grey corruption associated with organisational identity, which was mainly considered a positive factor in organisational behaviour, was found to increase. However, intrinsic motivation was found to be an interaction result that suppressed the increase in grey corruption caused by organisational identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Intrinsic motivation
• extrinsic motivation
• organisation identity
• black corruption
• grey corruption
• policing investigation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics committee approval

The survey data approved by Research Ethics Committee.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea [grant number: NRF-2019S1A5A8038640].