(Mis)managing employee motivation?
Obligatory student plans, intrinsic task motivation and public service motivation for Danish teachers

Motivated employees are crucial to all organizations, but some management initiatives may
actually decrease motivation. Motivation crowding theory thus expects that command
systems and incentives – if they are perceived as controlling - crowd out intrinsic motivation.
The perception is thus expected to be vital, and this paper investigates how the perception of
a specific command system – obligatory student plans – is associated with two types of
employee motivation (public service motivation and intrinsic task motivation). Using a
dataset with 3439 school teachers in Denmark, the analysis shows that the perception of
obligatory student plans as controlling is negatively associated with different types of
employee motivation, indicating that motivation crowding happens. Although the strength of
the associations varies between the investigated types of motivation, the findings imply that
practitioners should try to avoid that command systems are seen as controlling.