Research has suggested that workers in precarious work conditions tend to show a temporal discounting pattern for intertemporal choices (i.e., decisions that involve competing rewards between now and the future), which has the potential to reinforce their socioeconomic disadvantages. Integrating Immediate-Delayed Compensation Theory (Martin, 1999a) and Uncertainty Management Theory (Lind & van den Bos, 2002; van den Bos & Lind, 2002), this dissertation aims at explaining and identifying ways to mitigate the motivational challenges associated with workers in precarious conditions. Three studies were conducted to test the hypotheses: a two-factor factorial experiment, a three-wave longitudinal study covering a one-month period, and a three-wave longitudinal study based on a nationally representative sample covering a four-year period. Findings across these three studies suggest that a lack of belief in delayed pay-off could be the mechanism explaining why precarious work conditions trigger the development of a temporally-discounting pattern of behaviors. In order for workers to strive for and stay engaged for long-term career rewards, it is crucial that they believe their efforts will be fairly compensated in a distal future. This finding contends that self-control failure may not be the only, primary driver of worker’s intertemporal choice orientations and instead presents an alternative explanation that worker’s temporal discounting pattern can be socially determined. This dissertation also reveals that anticipatory organizational justice played a particularly critical role in promoting worker’s belief in delayed pay-off and their future-oriented behavioral pattern. Anticipatory organizational justice was also found to predict improvements in one’s subjective social status four years later, showing evidence for its effect on workers’ upward mobility. These positive effects remained valid at the presence of currently-experienced organizational justice in the same model, supporting the unique importance of the anticipated organizational justice for workers to stay motivated for their long-term careers in an uncertain, delayed-return situation. Findings from this dissertation provide meaningful implications for workplace inequality and upward social mobility.