A Nonmetric Scaling Approach To Taxonomies Of Employee Work Motivation

A nonmetric scaling method was used to test several taxonomies of work motivation. The intercorrelations among the importance ratings of 14 work goals, made by 800 salesmen and 1,800 repairmen were analyzed. A two-space solution was deemed adequate to reflect both the empirical and theoretical interrelationships among the variables. These results were consistent with an intrinsic-extrinsic grouping of the variables, but more complex relationships of motivational variables were also revealed. In particular, Alderfer's tripartite classification and Maslow's five-fold hierarchy were strongly supported by the smallest space analyses for both salesmen and repairmen.