In the modern business world, enterprises realize the importance of human resourcesoriented activities and act with the awareness that employee job satisfaction must first be ensured for customer satisfaction. Evaluating which factors can be effective on the variables such as employee satisfaction and job performances and developing policies in this direction is possible by identifying employees’ motivation factors. For this reason, today, organizations take into account the motivation factors that enable employees high performance. 

Motivation is a psychological process that can be expressed as a voluntary action to achieve a goal. The “Work Preference Inventory” (Amabile, Hill, Hennessey and Tighe 1994) is a four-dimensional measurement tool of motivational factors. It has been cited 2146 times until today. As there is not a Turkish version of the Work Preference Inventory, the purpose of this study is to translate the scale in Turkish and execute reliabilty and validity analysis. In Amabile Hill, Hennessey and Tighe’s work, the factors of intrinsic motivation were divided into two sub-dimensions: ‘challenge’ and ’enjoyment’. esinde in the behavioral struggle. Challenge is the tendency to reward yourself by overcoming difficult tasks. Enjoyment is when the activities are interesting and satisfying. Extrinsic motivation factors are considered in two sub-dimensions - ‘compensation’ and ‘outward. Compensation is a reward or income that is commensurate with the effort of the person. Outward is based on recognition and acceptance by others.

Banking is an area in the services sector where product diversity is difficult to create. The main factor that will create a competitive advantage in the banking sector is human resources. Therefore we determined the population of this study as the employees of the Turkish Banking Sector. The four-dimensional motivation assessment tool the ‘Work Preference Inventory’ developed by Amabile et. al. , detailed above, was used to identify the motivation elements of the banking sector employees.

The questionnaire, which was prepared to collect data from banking sector employees, was distributed to the banking sector employees via social media by the random sampling method. While 405 questionnaire forms were returned, the analysis was performed on 338 observations after clearing missing data forms and outliers.

Analysis showed that motivation of banking sector employees in Turkey has a fivedimensional structure. These dimensions are ‘Meaningful job and self-efficacy’, ‘Desire for unstructured works’, ‘Success at structured works’, ‘Awareness of success target’, ‘The search for specificity and consideration of others’ opinion’. ‘Meaningful job and self-efficacy’ means that the employee feels that she is doing something meaningful and valuable for herself and others and that she is competent in it. ‘Desire for unstructured works’ means the employee’s willingness to undertake new, compelling, complex tasks and responsibilities. ‘Success at structured works’ is the high performance of the employee, compared to others, in the tasks in which the requirements, characteristics, and manner of work are determined. ‘Awareness of success target’ means employee awareness of his career goals and curiosity to achieve them .‘The search for specificity and consideration of others’ opinion’ means an employee’s willingness to work in jobs where what is to be done is stated clearly, and a tendency to consider others’ thoughts.

The other purposes of this study are to determine the main elements that motivate the employees of the Turkish banking sector and to test the differences of these motivations in terms of demographic and structural factors of the sector. ‘Meaningful job and selfefficacy’ is identified as the most affecting factor on the motivation of the banking sector employees. ‘Awareness of success target’, ‘Desire for unstructured works’ and ‘The search for specificity and consideration of others’ opinion’ are evaluated as additional motivating factors consecutively. In comparison, ‘Success at structured works’ is determined as the least motivating factor. The differences in the motivation of the employees, in terms of experience, department, gender, age, education level and position are also examined. According to the analysis, banking employees with less than 3 years of experience or under 29 years of age have a higher motivation level for the ‘Meaningful job and selfefficacy’ factor; but the motivation of ‘The search for specificity and consideration of others’ opinion’of those under 29 years of age is lower; employees who don’t have a university degree have a high motivation in ‘Success at structured works’. According to the business departments in the study, the operation group employees’ motivation is lower than the employees of the support group; but the operation group employees have a higher motivation in ‘Success at structured works’ than the other groups; and the support group employees have high motivation to ‘The search for specificity and consideration of others’ opinion’. There is no difference between motivational dimensions in terms of the positions and genders of banking employees.