Why Your Job Motivation May Depend on Where You Work, New Review Finds

What makes an employee engaged at work? According to a sweeping new systematic review published in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology, the answer depends less on whether you work for a government agency or a private corporation than on two things you largely control yourself: how actively you reshape your own job, and how internally driven your motivation is. The review, conducted by Harshdeep Singh and Jangjeet Chahal at Amity University in Gwalior, India, synthesized 63 studies spanning more than a dozen countries and found that job crafting and autonomous motivation were the most reliable predictors of work engagement across sectors, occupations, and cultures.

Job crafting describes the self-initiated changes employees make to the task, relational, and cognitive boundaries of their work. Rather than waiting for top-down job redesign, workers who craft their jobs proactively add resources, take on challenging demands, and reframe how they think about their roles. The review found this behavior was positively associated with work engagement in the large majority of studies that examined the link, most often interpreted through the Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) pathway, in which job resources fuel a motivational process that culminates in engagement. Two meta-analyses included in the synthesis reported consistent pooled associations across roughly 19,000 to 20,000 employees, lending the strongest quantitative support to this pattern.

The motivational side of the picture follows Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which arranges motivation along a continuum from amotivation through externally controlled regulation to autonomous, intrinsic motivation. The review confirmed that self-determined motivation was positively associated with engagement, whereas controlled motivation and amotivation were negatively associated. In a Singapore two-wave study, intrinsic and autonomous motivation mediated the association between transformational-leadership perceptions and engagement. In a Pakistani sample, empowering leadership was associated with higher engagement partly via intrinsic motivation, with the indirect association stronger at higher self-efficacy. A Chinese study found gamified HR practices were associated with higher engagement, partially through intrinsic motivation.

But the private-sector picture is not uniformly intrinsic-dominant. In one Indonesian telecommunications sample, extrinsic motivation was more strongly associated with engagement than intrinsic motivation, showing that the relative weight of motivation types is context-dependent. In the public sector, a distinct motivational construct—public service motivation (PSM)—supplements the SDT account. PSM was associated with engagement and affective commitment in an Indonesian government agency, with engagement mediating downstream associations, and had a strong association with engagement in a large Indonesian state-owned-enterprise sample.

Direct public-versus-private comparisons were far fewer than the core construct associations: only five included studies made a genuine direct statistical comparison, and their direction was inconsistent. Some found public-sector employees higher on selected engagement components such as vigor and absorption, others found no sector difference or higher private-sector motivation, with the pattern depending on the specific crafting dimension or motivation source examined. In a Pakistani education sample, job-crafting–outcome links were significant in the private but not the public sector. In an Israeli comparison, private-firm employees had higher internal motivation than public-sector employees. In a Slovenian study, no overall sector difference in motivation type emerged. The public-sector literature has, in effect, developed its own motivational vocabulary—PSM, red tape, bureaucratic leadership—that private-sector studies rarely invoke, making head-to-head comparison harder than it first appears.

Evidence on age, gender, and tenure was limited, heterogeneous, and frequently null or small in magnitude. Age and tenure showed occasional small positive associations with engagement and a qualitative shift in the intrinsic/extrinsic balance of motivation, but null results were common. Gender effects were the least consistent of all, appearing in some samples, reversing across others, and absent in many. A Serbian validation study found women slightly more engaged, with a practically negligible effect size. A two-group study found men higher on vigor but women higher on self-efficacy and dedication. Several studies found no gender difference at all. Measurement-invariance studies confirmed that crafting scales function equivalently across genders, suggesting the constructs themselves are gender-equivalent even when sample-specific effects appear.

The Indian evidence was the most actionable gap identified. The handful of Indian studies confirm that the core associations hold in India—an Indian retail-banking study found job-crafting dimensions predicted roughly 38 percent of engagement variance, with increasing social job resources the strongest predictor—but they do not resolve the sector or demographic questions. No eligible study identified within the present search jointly examined job crafting, work motivation, and work engagement in an Indian public-versus-private design with age, gender, and tenure moderators. A cross-country India–Indonesia study explicitly flagged unexplained India-specific dynamics, hinting at contextual differences that the authors could not fully explain.

Interpretation is tempered by study quality. Of the 63 studies, 11 were rated Low concern, 46 Moderate concern, and 6 High concern using domains adapted from the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool and cross-sectional checklists. The weaker cross-sectional and single-site studies should not be read as equivalent to the meta-analytic and diary/two-wave evidence. The core associations survive this weighting; the sector and demographic patterns, resting on fewer and often High-concern studies, do not. The review also acknowledges its own limitations: it was not prospectively registered, screening and appraisal were performed by a single reviewer, and retrieval was incomplete, with 96 of 175 reports sought unavailable as full text.

Because the evidence base is predominantly cross-sectional and self-report, the findings are associational rather than causal. The proposed theoretical sequence—job crafting increases job resources, resources support autonomous motivation, and autonomous motivation sustains engagement—remains an organizing lens rather than a directly tested pathway. Practically, job-crafting training and resource-oriented job redesign are plausible levers for engagement, but hindrance-reducing crafting may raise strain and should be handled cautiously. Sector- and context-tailoring appears warranted rather than a one-size-fits-all programme.

The clearest opportunity for original contribution, the authors conclude, is an integrated Indian study examining all three constructs together in a matched public–private design with adequate power to test demographic moderation—a configuration the current literature has not delivered. Until then, the most defensible summary is that engaged employees tend to be those who craft their jobs and are autonomously motivated, regardless of sector, and that the demographic and sector differences so often assumed in workplace discourse remain, on present evidence, smaller and less portable than intuition suggests.

Subject of Research: Job crafting, work motivation, and work engagement among public- and private-sector employees: a systematic review of sector, age, gender, and tenure differences

Article Title: Job crafting, work motivation, and work engagement among public- and private-sector employees: a systematic review of sector, age, gender, and tenure differences

Article References: Singh, H., & Chahal, J. (2026). Job crafting, work motivation, and work engagement among public- and private-sector employees: a systematic review of sector, age, gender, and tenure differences. Frontiers in Organizational Psychology, 4, Article 1969428. https://doi.org/10.3389/forgp.2026.1969428

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/forgp.2026.1969428

Keywords: crafting, work, motivation, engagement, public-, private-sector, employees, systematic, review, sector, gender, tenure