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Top1. Introduction
Today many companies strive to recruit and retain employees who are intelligent and competitive. Human capital is inseparable from the survival of a business and, therefore, is a key resource that must be developed well over time. For many companies, the improvement of employee competence is important because truly qualified employees enable companies to survive in the future. Low employee quality does not only reduce organizational productivity, it also results in the declining satisfaction of the stakeholders, including consumers and shareholders.
On the corporate side, mining companies traditionally have had difficulty to find and retain local workers. In 2005, the mining sector in Indonesia had 8,589 foreign workers and 947,097 local workers (Sholeh, 2007). Moreover, although Indonesian workers are still dominant in the local workforce (over 99%), even in the mining sector there exists a great revenue gap. The 2009 National Survey on Foreign Workers in Indonesia reported that the average salary of foreign workers in the mining sector was the highest in all sectors amounting to a salary of over Indonesian Rupiah (IDR) 125 million per month (Yudanto et al., 2010). On the other hand, the average salary of all employees in 2017 was only IDR 4.42 million per month (Ariyanti, 2017), which indicated that the average salary of local workers was much lower than the average for foreign workers. The main cause is that local workers in the mining sector still lack adequate qualifications when competing against foreign workers. Therefore, the government has attempted to improve the qualifications of local workers in the mining sector (Merdeka, 2016).
In line with this situation the extant literature has developed recognition theory. According to this theory, humans depend on feedback from other humans, including the community, to develop their identity. People who fail to obtain recognition, either viewed from one side only (incomplete) or viewed negatively, relatively has an issue in appreciating themselves and also judging that their actions are meaningful. As a result, people who experience ignorance develop psychological problems as humans who are inferior to others (Iser, 2013). An alternative to the field of psychology related to recognition is the theory of self-determination from Ryan and Deci (2000). This theory states that people are intrinsically and extrinsically motivated to improve their performance. Recognition is a source of extrinsic motivation as are salary increases. Unlike recognition theory, the theory of self-determination has been intensively researched in the field of Human Resource Management (HRM).
Indeed, the absence of comparative research on recognition and determination theory provides a theoretical and empirical gap that must be closed immediately. If recognition theory is correct, then recognition should be more powerful in influencing self-concept than intrinsic motivation such as interest in work (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Meanwhile, if recognition influences performance positively, then we could be quite confident with Honneth's recognition theory or Deci's and Ryan's self-determination theory. But if recognition influences performance negatively, then recognition theory from Islam (2012) could be raised because this version of recognition theory sees that recognition of competence is a form of objectification and employees, as a human being, are deemed unhappily objectified because this reduces their self-concept.
The first gap in this study was that it was based on the theory of recognition which largely focused on conflicts in socio-political issues. The discussion usually perceived the effects of the absence of recognition (reification) and misrecognition. The remaining first gap was that this study was conducted based on the theory of recognition in a qualitative framework. Della and Keating (2008) compared the qualitative theory of recognition with quantitative game theory which can be reconciled as both discuss about external motivation.