It sounds like a bad joke, but then again…
For all the readers who are new to this publication, let me state that on Fridays I write entertaining and quirky missives that are quirky but based on a grain of truth. I do not intend to insult anyone with these posts. But if you are reading dozens of emails each week with new academic research in economics and finance and you get an email with a link to a paper titled “The Priest, the Sex Worker, and the CEO: Measuring Motivation by Job Type” could you resist clicking on the link?
It certainly worked as clickbait for me. And it turns out, what the researchers did in that study is to interview 181 participants from 18 different jobs ranging from priests to sex workers about how they see their jobs and what motivates them to do these jobs. Based on the structured interviews and the answers the interviewees gave on the typical scale of 0 to 5 points they ranked the 18 different professions across different dimensions ranging from affective commitment (i.e. how much a person emotionally identifies with the value of the profession or the firm they work in) to intrinsic motivation and whether they are in their jobs solely as a means of economic exchange (i.e. they are doing it for the money rather than anything else).
The overall results are interesting but below I focus on a selection of ten jobs and three characteristics. I have ranked the jobs by intrinsic motivation from lowest to highest. Note also that economic exchange as a motive is inverted, i.e. lower values mean that these people are more inclined to look at their job as a payment for service and nothing else.
Looking at the chart, do you notice something about the grouping of professions?
I let you decide why CEOs end up to the right together with artists and priests while stockbrokers and lawyers end up to the left with sex workers.
Motivational factors across different professions
Source: Amulf et al. (2020).