اثر انگیزه بی تفاوتی در اهداف کارکنان بر استفاده از رسانه های اجتماعی برای کسب و کار  The effect of apathetic motivation on employees’ intentions to use social media for businesses

1. Introduction Motivation has been broadly characterized as one of the more powerful predictors of human behavior—a key predictor of performance for practitioners and a crucial element in creating theories of behavior for theorists (Steers, Mowday, & Shapiro, 2004). Thus, it is not surprising that motivation appears in a variety of discipline journals (e.g., Davis, Bagozzi, & Warshaw, 1992; Fitzmaurice, 2005; Levin & Hansen, 2008; Miao & Evans, 2007), nor that business researchers and managers have great interest in understanding individuals’ motivation to use social media and mobile technologies on behalf of businesses (e.g., Leftheriotis & Giannakos, 2014; Levin, Hansen, & Laverie, 2012). While most research studies and textbooks continue to treat motivation as a bi-dimensional construct (comprised of extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation), a few studies have suggested a third form of motivation—apathetic motivation (e.g., Deci & Ryan, 2002; Levin et al., 2012; Vallerand, Fortier, & Guay, 1997). Apathetic motivation is defined as a lack of interest or enthusiasm in a particular task or topic. Reasons for its presence could include lack of confidence in the ability to perform a task and/or lack of belief in materialization of the desired outcomes. We find it fascinating that there appears to be a prevailing view in research that a “lack of interest” is treated as equivalent to a “lack of motivation” in the conceptual discussion, scaling, and analysis in most research studies that mention it. Verily, we disagree with that treatment. We argue that apathetic motivation is not simply the absence of other motivations. Rather, we posit that the lack of interest or enthusiasm is independent of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Indeed, we propose that what many have considered to be a single phenomenon (compounding motivations and amotivations) is actually multiple distinct phenomena, as specified in the next paragraph. Consequently, the purpose of this research is to outline and investigate the hypothesis that apathetic motivation can exist simultaneously with extrinsic motivation and/or intrinsic motivation—with the goal of improving our understanding of why some intrinsically or extrinsically motivated workers do not act on those motivations in the important context of using social media for businesses. Adopting that goal, the contribution of this article to the existing motivation literature is the first empirical investigation containing joint examination of (1) apathetic motivation’s direct contribution to behavioral intention independent of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations’ contributions; (2) potential interactions of apathetic motivation with (a) extrinsic or intrinsic motivation on intention to use or (b) intention to use on actual usage or outcomes; and (3) interactions between intention to use social media technologies based on the combined motivations and employee job roles (i.e., moderated moderation).