Temporal Dynamics in Public Employee Regulation, Perceptions, and Motivation: The Importance of Context

Research finds strong correlations between how employees perceive regulation and their motivation, but we lack a full understanding of how these dynamics evolve over time and across regulatory contexts. This article addresses this gap by analyzing how changes over time in actual national regulation and teachers’ individual perceptions of the regulation relate to their intrinsic task motivation. Empirically, we utilize variation over time in national regulation of primary and lower secondary schools in Denmark. Large teacher surveys from 2010, 2014, and 2023 inform us about teachers’ perceptions of the varying regulation and their intrinsic task motivation. We find that teachers who perceive national regulation as supportive – rather than controlling – tend to have higher intrinsic task motivation. Additionally, teachers’ intrinsic task motivation decreased over time as national regulation became more restrictive. Notably, the decrease continued even when regulation later became less restrictive, suggesting that restrictive regulation may have long-term negative consequences for motivation. While isolating individual context factors remains challenging, our analysis of employee perceptions and motivation indicates that national regulation can play a key role in shaping motivation. The results are interpreted based on qualitative responses from 1,724 teachers and deepen our understanding of temporal dynamics in regulation and motivation.