Sustainable development and intrinsic and extrinsic employee motivation

The purpose of this research project was to give a better understanding of the relationship between sustainable development and employee motivation. More specifically, this study focused on the influence of sustainable development over intrinsic and extrinsic employee motivation, and aimed to identify and explain the different motivators at stake in this connection. We decided to select sustainable development and motivation as our two main theories, and we carefully developed them in our theoretical framework. Beside that, we chose to follow an interpretivist paradigm and to conduct qualitative interviews with employees. For this research project, we contacted Brocard, a French wine producer seriously involved in sustainable development for almost 20 years. After having designed an interview guide thanks to our theoretical framework and our own knowledge, we carried out six semi-structured interviews via Skype with the company and collected almost three hours of data. After the retranscription and the translation of these interviews, we presented the empirical results and analyzed the data by following a thematic analysis. We managed to group a great number of concepts under three themes (satisfaction, working environment, and performance) and discussed them. The results showed several motivators at stake when employees were confronted to sustainable development, either intrinsic and extrinsic. Several limitations can be underlined in our research project, as the difference of language between the respondents and the final writing thesis, which probably caused the loss of some information, or the fact that this study is partly limited to France, due to the company we contacted. To go beyond those results, we suggested to develop the same type of study in other countries or other areas of the world, and then compare the results