How to Satisfy Experts? An Empirical Examination of Tangible and Intangible Influences on Knowledge Workers' Willingness to Perform

In the industrial age rather simple carrot and stick motivational approaches worked pretty well in a command-and-control management to increase manual workers' productivity. Thus, the reasonable alignment of bonuses (i.e., the carrot) and the menace of punishment for shirking (i.e., the stick) resulted in an economic plethora. However, today we are living in a knowledge society - where employees produce value by means of their individual mental skills. Hence, the biggest future managerial task will be to increase knowl-edge worker productivity - which is inextricably linked to the improvement of their work motivation. Monetary rewards alone will not be sufficient to reach this goal - the best people with the most important skills work for more than just cash. Things to keep in mind are making the knowledge job itself mean-ingful and bringing about psychological well-being by improvement of the organizational culture. Thus, in my dissertation thesis I will empirically analyze how to balance traditional extrinsic reward allocation and the forward-looking idea of the establishment of an intrinsic satisfying culture of cooperation in order to motivate knowledge workers to walk the extra mile in the long run. The reasonable combination of both factors has potential to generate an economic surplus since the successful management of human knowledge resources in today's and tomorrow's world is expected to boost an economic growth.