Empirical analysis on motivated agents among long-term caregivers in Japan

This study investigated ‘motivated agents’ among Japanese long-term caregivers. ‘Motivated agents’ are workers who are driven by altruistic and intrinsic motivation rather than monetary factors, previous studies have shown that motivated agents mostly work at non-profit and public organizations. This study analyses data from the 2016 Fact-Finding Survey on Long-Term Care Work, comprising individual data on Japanese long-term caregivers. I used multinominal logit estimation to identify the dependent variable that indicates the likelihood of each worker belonging to for-profit, non-profit, or public organizations. Factor analysis was used to identify the independent variables, which are motivations derived from a survey question about why workers chose their current jobs. The results show that non-monetary factors affect workers’ choices of organization type. However, they also show that workers of for-profit companies are more motivated by sympathy with their organizations’ philosophies than workers of non-profit and public organizations, implying that workers at for-profit companies are more motivated by non-monetary factors. The possible reasons for this discrepancy, notably corporate social responsibility, are discussed.