Would you accept this job? An evaluation of the decision utility of workers in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors

In this paper, we intend to evaluate the determinants of the decision utility of workers from the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. In our setting, decision utility is the weight assigned by workers to the expected benefits from job offers. For that purpose, we use the methodology of conjoint analysis that collects experimental data on workers’ stated preferences towards hypothetical job offers characterized by ten attributes. Intrinsic motivation of nonprofit workers is investigated by specifically analyzing the influence on decision utility of three of these attributes, namely wages, working time and loyalty from the employer. The results show evidence of motivational differences between the two groups. First, nonprofit workers attain their maximum decision utility at a longer working time, showing superior intrinsic motivation for work. Furthermore, they are ready to abandon a higher percentage of their wage in order to work for another extra hour than for-profit workers as long as the working week is inferior to 33 hours. Finally, our findings show that for-profit workers evaluate more highly job offers with labour contract including explicit clause where higher effort is exchanged for employer’s loyalty. In contrast, nonprofit workers do not obtain higher utility from such a deal. We interpret this result as evidence of their intrinsic motivation. As the nature of the implicit goals pursued in the nonprofit sector provides them with high work morale, they do not obtain any gain in utility from an explicit clause of employer’s loyalty.