ABSTRACT
Employee motivation is currently a cornerstone of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology. By the late 20th century, motivation research dominated I-O psychology journal space, accounting for one third of the published articles (Cooper & Robertson, 1986). In the final decade, motivation became the “most frequently researched topic in micro organizational behavior” (O’Reilly, 1991, p. 431). Yet this was not true in the early part of that century. Then the focus was on employee selection, and the topic of motivation was left to studies of laboratory animals by experimental psychologists or to studies of tasks in the workplace conducted by engineers. As late as 1959, Cofer lamented that motivation was not one of the categories used by Psychological Abstracts.
