Work Motivation under Communist Rule: Heritage from the Past in Modern Public Sector Organisations

Applying retrospective design methodology, the article adds to our knowledge about inherited organisational values and their impact on management policies and practices. Questioning the label of Central and Eastern European workforce as low-motivated, shirking and passive, this article outlines the historical context of work motivation in former communist countries, investigating to what extent the motivation in public service organisations today may be explained by the past. It employs a framework developed by Vandenabeele et al. (2013) that connects management intentions to organisational and employee outcomes to analyse the malfunctions of the former rewards system and to examine how those impairments continue to influence public sector motivation today.

Confirming Inglehart’s ‘scarcity’ theory, this article demonstrates that the several decades that passed after the fall of communism were insufficient in completely overcoming communist heritage. Malfunctions of the centralised communist motivation system resulted from the discordance between the management intentions and actions. Dysfunctions of monetary-based incentive schemes caused overwhelming work lethargy of shirking employees, who were discouraged from being creative or displaying initiative. Such patterns have still been observable at some public organisations in former Soviet countries. Thus, the past centralisation of the state continues to determine individual work motivation in public sector domains even today.