Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivations of Master of Library amp; Information Science (MLIS) Students: A Cross Cultural Comparative Study
This study was designed to identify the various career and learning motivational factors that influenced the decisions of individuals to pursue careers in LIS. We developed four hypotheses for looking into whether (i) prior working experience in a library would motivate a person to pursuing for an MLIS degree; (ii) whether intrinsic and extrinsic factors would motive their choice; and (iii) whether their cultural background would moderate their behavior. We also gathered the demographic and other related information to conduct some basic analyses.
First of all, we discovered that prior working experience in a library would be an important factor that would affect the participantsrsquo; career choices, i.e., H1. This result echoes prior research results, which indicates that the opportunity to undertake work experience appears to be another factor affecting studentsrsquo; career decision-making (McClenney, 1989). It has been argued that working experience provides students with opportunities to explore different jobs and learn about their future career (Moniarou-Papaconstantinou, Tsatsaroni, Katsis, amp; Koulaidis, 2010). As a result, they developed more confidence to make their career decisions (Guindon amp; Richmond, 2005). Students with limited work experience, however, tend to be a lack of the ability to generate career options or just make their career decisions based on their career interests rather than their abilities associated with their career (Feldman amp; Whitcomb, 2005). As a result, students with working experience in the related field are likely to make more effective career decisions than those without experience. This study, therefore, demonstrated the value of relevant library working experience would influence the participants to make their careerdecision-making process, because it provided them with the opportunities to learn about their potential career (for example, the actual working conditions and environment and the expected job skills and knowledge), and develop their abilities relevant to their job expectations of their future career as an LIS professional. The results of this study also indicated that the influence of prior working experience in the library of their choice of taking up an academic librarian career is moderated by the cultural background of our students. In particular, the prior working experience in the library contributed more to the decision making process of students from Hong Kong and Taiwan but has less contribution to Danish students as shown in the results presented in our Table 5 in the previous section, which supports H3.
Our H2 and H4 focused on examining whether the different intrinsic or extrinsic factors would influence a personrsquo;s decision in pursuing an MLIS degree. In the first part of our study, we discovered that factors like “want to stay competitive in the library field”, “allows opportunities to transfer my skills and knowledge to library work”, and “being interested in LIS” were the core intrinsic-extrinsic factors amongst a majority of the student participants at all four universities to select a career in LIS. It is also interesting to note that “career advancement in the library field” and “being interested in LIS” are the two most influential factors, which students at HKU, TNNU, and UC viewed as the top factors, whereas “want to change into a profession that gives more job security” and “want to stay competitive in the LIS field” were ranked as the top factors for amongst the PKU students for entering the LIS filed (see Table 6). Such results reflect that there are significant cultural differences in the selection criteria when it is coming to making decision on career choices.
When we look further into the impacts of factors in details, we note that both intrinsic and extrinsic factors are having significant and yet distinctive influences. Based on our U-test, we note that the ranking of these two types of factors were indifferent amongst the participants at HKU, TNNU, and PKU. However, intrinsic factors (i.e., factors related to achievement, growth, recognition, advancement, and the work itself) were considered to be more important for the UC students. As we do not observe that extrinsic factors are having more significant impact (i.e., our Danish participants prefer intrinsic factors over extrinsic factors, while our Hongkonger, Taiwanese, and Chinese subjects are indifferent between the intrinsic and extrinsic factors), we can say that intrinsic factors are important factors, which echoes the Theory of Vocational Personalities and Environments proposed by Holland (1973). In this study, we observed that people are entering into the career of LIS not for the money or benefits, but rather they feel it matches their interests. As highlighted by Ard, Clemmons, Morgan, Sessions, Spencer, Tidwell and West (2006, p. 241), “the (librarianship) profession will benefit from the inflow of intrinsically motivated people who enjoy the nature of the work, and will likely stick with the profession even, if the salaries and the public image of librarians do not improve dramatically in the next few years.”
The significant impacts of the intrinsic factors in our U-Test for the UC students can be explained by the Hofstede Cultural Dimensions as regions with lower power distance index are known to be in favor of using intrinsic factors in the career-related decision marking (Phatak, Bhagat, amp; Kashlak, 2005), whereas the three other regions are having high power distance values and are less likely to use intrinsic factors in the career-related decision making. In particular, the power distance index value for Danish is more than about two standard deviations lower from the mean power distance value of all 110 countries surveyed (see Table 2) and can be considered as a coun
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