Mediating role of intrinsic work motivation in relationship between job commitment and professional ethics with firefighters' extra-role performance

A firefighting job is a demanding job that has a high degree of stress due to constant exposure to life-threatening conditions. Therefore, the present study was conducted to investigate the mediating role of intrinsic job motivation in the relationship between job commitment and professional ethics with extra-role performance among firefighters in Isfahan.

The type of study was descriptive and the method was correlation. Statistical population included all firefighters in Isfahan, from which 228 people were selected as a sample through random sampling. The instruments used includedinternal job motivation questionnaires (Gagne et al., 2015), job commitment (Blau, 2009), professional ethics (Hackerina, 2011) and extra-role performance (Lee and Allen, 2002). Data were analyzed by the Pearson correlation coefficient and structural equation modeling (SEM). SPSS23 and Smart PLS3 software were used for data analysis.

The results showed that professional ethics has a direct effect on intrinsic job motivation, extra-role performance toward organization and individual; Intrinsic job motivation has a direct effect on the extra-role performance toward individual; Job commitment has a direct effect on intrinsic job motivation and extra-role performance toward organization (P <0.05). Also, the proposed model has a good fit and by examining the indirect and mediating effects through the bootstrapping method in PLS software, was shown that intrinsic job motivation mediates the effect of job commitment and professional ethics on the extra- role performance toward individual.

The findings of the present study showed that professional ethics and job commitment could increases extra-role behaviors through intrinsic job motivation. Therefore, due to the role and importance of extra-role behaviors in the firefighting profession, attention to this important finding should be considered by managers and policymakers of this organization.