Internet use, innovative workplace practices and workers' motivations: Empirical evidence at the European level

The importance of technological changes and innovative workplace practices in influencing firms' performance has been widely acknowledged, but the way workers are motivated in this framework is still largely neglected. As it is well known in the principal-agent literature, agents are predisposed to shirk, so, in order to obtain productivity gains the principal need to provide workers with sufficient incentives and to encourage motivations. This article seeks to provide answers to the question of how Internet use and work reorganization can modify workers' intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. The results are obtained with a unique dataset form European countries collected in 2005 at the worker level (European Working Conditions Survey). The paper focuses on Internet use and innovative workplace practices controlling for incentives and individuals, firms and countries characteristics. The main results indicate that offering the access to Internet to workers is positively linked with workers' intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Intrinsic motivations are "crowded in" when the firm provides positive incentives and "crowded out" when the firm resorts to monitoring. The models of production organisation and human resources practices that favour the quality of work environment and the involvement of workers permit to motivate them both intrinsically and extrinsically.