Unique Factors for Motivating Engineers: A Motivation Meta Theory Approach

According to the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, the United States is not producing enough engineers to meet the growing needs of employers (as cited in Von Bergen, 2012). While engineers represent an important role in American industry, engineers are leaving the profession or are unsatisfied with their work (Stabbert, 2010) while engineer output per hour and per engineer is declining (Bureau of Labor and Statistics, 2012). As a potential remedy to this injurious industry trend, application of motivation theories can improve employee retention (Ramlall, 2004), detect and correct morale problems (Herzberg, 2003), detect an engineer\u27s development needs (Shoura & Singh, 1998), and have shown effects in predicting, understanding, and influencing choice, affect and performance (Latham & Pinder, 2005, p. 493) of workers. As little meaningful research has been performed to determine if engineers are motivated differently from their peer knowledge workers, most organizations take a one size fits all approach to employee motivation. In this dissertation, data will be collected and analyzed relative to the importance of individual motivational factors in order to determine if engineers have unique motivating factors when compared to their peer knowledge workers. A comprehensive evaluation of motivation factors, utilizing the meta-theory of motivation, shall be used in order to evaluate motivation factors from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives