There are three possible ways to address the energization question.

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1 Stefan: Dear Ed, it is a true honor for me to have this conversation with you. Your work on human motivation, most often in collaboration with your colleague Richard M. Ryan, has been highly inspirational and influential for me. Your theory about self-determined motivation, which we of course will define and talk about during this conversation, provides the base for many, if not most, of the services we at the Centre for Leadership offer our client organizations. Not only is it very intuitively appealing, but more important than that it has such a strong empirical support gained from decades of research in hundreds of scientific studies. As we work hard to make a stand for evidence based practices in organizational consulting the latter is the major reason the selfdetermination theory has been so influential for us. Before running in to detail about that theory I think it would be good to go back to the basics of what we are going to talk about, namely human motivation. Everyone talks about it and have some idea of what they mean by it, and most say it has more importance than capacity (motivation beats class as the saying goes). What can then be a better starting question to ask one of the leading scholars of the field than: What, really, is motivation? Ed: At its core, motivation concerns the energy for action. It is what moves people to behave. So motivation is centrally about the energization of behavior, but it is also about the direction of behavior. The key motivation questions are (1) what energizes people s behavior? And (2) how is people s behavior directed? There are three possible ways to address the energization question. First, energy can come from basic biological needs (i.e., necessities). All people, for example, need food and water to grow and remain healthy. If these basic biological needs are not met, the person will experience illness or ill-being. If denied satisfaction of these needs for a long time, the consequences are very severe. Second, energy can come from emotions. When people are excited, they have energy to behave. When people are angry, they are energized to act. When people are sad they have energy to do particular things. Third, energy can come from basic psychological needs (i.e., necessities). All people, regardless of gender, culture, race, or socioeconomic status need to have three psychological needs satisfied in order to develop in a healthy way and to experience ongoing psychological well-being. If these needs are not satisfied, the person will experience some psychological illness or ill-being. The three basic psychological needs are the needs for (i) competence, (ii) autonomy, and (iii) relatedness. That is, everyone needs to feel a sense of effectance or mastery in his or her world; everyone needs to feel able to accomplish goals and obtain desired outcomes. That sense of mastery and efficacy is what we mean by competence. Further, everyone needs to feel a sense of volition, of willingness to act, of endorsing that which one is doing. This sense of volition is what we mean by autonomy. It is important to note that autonomy does not mean to be independent of others; it means to really concur with what one is doing and to regulate oneself with a true sense of choice. Finally, everyone needs to feel like he or she belongs within some collective a couple, a family, or a group, for example and everyone needs to feel cared for by some others and to care for some

2 others. These then are the three basic psychological needs competence, autonomy, and relatedness and their satisfaction are essential for optimal motivation, experience, and performance. For addressing issues of motivation (i.e., energization) in the workplace or in other organizations such as schools and health care agencies, the energization question is by far most effectively addressed with the concept of the three basic psychological needs. This is because, first, the three psychological needs are directly relevant to what is happening in organizations at any given time. Second, it is because the three psychological needs play a key role in the effective regulation of both biological needs and emotions, so even when the biological needs or emotions are energizing an action within an organization, the three psychological needs must also be operating for the behaviors to be effective. (That last point is, perhaps, getting a bit ahead of ourselves right now.) The most useful way of addressing the direction question is with the concept of goals. Goals are outcomes or end-states; they are what people are trying to achieve at any time. Goals can be short-term something one is trying to accomplish in the next few minutes or they can be broader aims that guide one s behavior over several years (e.g., the goal of graduating from university). So, we think about the concept of motivation primarily in terms of the energization of actions by the basic psychological needs, and the direction of that energized behavior by goals or outcomes that people would like to achieve. It is the case in many theories of motivation that motivation is considered to be a unitary concept. That is, motivation is thought to vary in terms of amount people are either more motivated or less motivated. However, within self-determination theory, Richard M. Ryan and I have always taken a differentiated view of motivation. We have always thought that it is more important to ask what type of motivation a person has than how much motivation a person has, and the research supports this view. The primary distinction we make is between autonomous motivation and controlled motivation. Autonomous motivation is motivation that comes from one s own sense of self; it involves acting in accord with one s interests or deeply held values. When one is autonomously motivated, the person acts with a full sense of choice. Autonomous motivation involves actions that are self-regulated, and this type of motivation has been found to be associated with the most positive outcomes. In contrast, controlled motivation is motivation that involves pressure to behave in particular ways. Either forces outside the person, such as a demand from an authority, or forces within the person that have not been accepted as his or her own are the basis for controlled motivation. When one acts to just to get a reward from an authority figure, or when one acts just to feel like a worthy person, one is being controlled. Much of the research that our group has done for the past 40 years has worked with the concepts of autonomous and controlled motivation. Stefan: Thank you Ed, so let me try to give a brief summary of your previous answer before turning to my next question, and please correct me if I am wrong. First, a brief definition of motivation is that it is the force that initiates our behavior in a certain direction (i.e., towards approaching or avoiding certain goals/end-states) and then directs the effort we put in it and our persistency in performing it (i.e., what we do, how hard we try and for how long). The driving force behind our behaviors is rooted in basic biological needs that we need for

3 survival and reproduction (such as eating when hungry, sleeping when tired, keeping warm when cold, having sex when in that mood etc.), in our emotions (such as aggressively arguing when angry, socializing when happy, seeking support when sad etc.), and, finally and perhaps most importantly when speaking about motivation in an organizational context, in our basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness. These three needs are essential for our capacity to deal with our biological needs and emotions, for our mental well-being and for our development. I think that, for me, the fundamental importance of these needs is maybe most obvious when thinking about situations in life in which one has not had these needs satisfied. Anyone who has experienced it know how enormously emotionally and functionally devastating it can be, for instance to work for a manager who micromanages and controls everything in detail (need for autonomy thwarted), and/or repeatedly criticizes and points out all mistakes and shortcomings (need for competence thwarted), and/or is cold, detached or even bullying (need for relatedness thwarted). With these needs in mind, you also said that the amount of motivation experienced is less important than the kind of motivation one has, and then distinguished between controlled motivation (i.e., I must or I should ) and autonomous motivation (i.e., I want to ). Have I understood you correctly if I say that the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness are underlying/unconscious (or at least subconscious) driving forces while the kind of motivation one experiences is in form of conscious thoughts about previous, present and future behaviors? If that is the case, what is the relationship between our underlying psychological needs and our conscious motivation (i.e., In what sense does satisfaction or thwarting of basic psychological needs relate to conscious thoughts about kind of motivation)? Please let me know if the question is fuzzy. Ed: Everything you said is exactly on target, up to the last paragraph. So let me start there, because that is where your question is anyway. To be autonomously motivated is natural; it is in our nature. There are two types of autonomous motivation: intrinsic motivation and well internalized extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation involves doing something because the activity is interesting and enjoyable in its own right. Children learn and act on the environment because they find it interesting and enjoyable to do so. The reward is in the doing of the activity. Adults, especially during leisure time are sometimes intrinsically motivated, for example to read a book or go skiing. Extrinsic motivation, in contrast, means doing something to get some separate reward such as money or prizes, or to avoid a punishment, or to please an authority. These two types of motivation are quite different. Intrinsic motivation is the prototype of autonomous motivation. Extrinsic motivation, represented by the carrot and stick that is, chasing the carrot and avoiding the stick is an example of extrinsically motivated behavior. Much research has shown that when extrinsic rewards, threats, deadlines, and evaluations are added to intrinsic motivation, the extrinsic factors tend to decrease a person s intrinsic motivation. So here is a case where, if you add the two types of motivation together the resulting motivation is less than the total should be because the intrinsic motivation will be undermined by the extrinsic motivators. However, all the news is not bad. Although the classic type of extrinsic motivation is quite controlled, it is possible to internalize extrinsic motivation and gradually change it. Internalization is a process whereby a person takes in something that was initially external. For example, children tend to internalize their parents values and attitudes. Like intrinsic motivation, internalization is also a natural process. Much research shows

4 that people do internalize extrinsic motivation to some extent, and in the process it is possible to transform extrinsic motivation into self-motivation. Stated differently, if the internalization process has functioned effectively, the person s extrinsic motivation will have become relatively autonomous, because the person will have integrated the motivation into his or her own sense of self. Some internalization is only partial, however. Sometimes we take in controlling extrinsic motivation and keep it in more-or-less its same form, so we start to control and pressure ourselves with it. For example, when parents control and pressure their children by making the parental love contingent upon their child doing or being what the parents want, the children will tend to partially internalize the motivation (we use the term introjection for that phenomenon). The children then control and pressure themselves by making their own feelings of worth and lovability dependent on doing or being what the parents want. The point is that autonomous motivation (which is the optimal motivation) consists of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation that has been fully internalized. Extrinsic motivation that has not been internalized (e.g., carrot and stick motivation) and extrinsic motivation that has been only introjected form the bases for controlled motivation, which is less optimal motivation. This brings us to the tie-in between the three basic psychological needs and the two types of motivation namely autonomous and controlled. It turns out that the three basic psychological needs must be satisfied in order for intrinsic motivation to be maintained and for extrinsic motivation to be fully internalized. In situations where the needs are met, people will maintain and enhance their autonomous motivation, but in situations where the needs are thwarted, people will maintain controlled motivation that is, they will be externally motivated by rewards and punishments and also by introjected extrinsic controls. Or if the thwarting is bad enough, people may lose all their motivation. So now back to your last paragraph above. The issue is that satisfaction of the basic psychological needs provides the nutriments that are necessary for the natural processes of intrinsic motivation and internalization. Satisfaction of the autonomy, competence, and relatedness needs nourish the natural intrinsic motivation; satisfaction of these needs also nourishes internalization. The processes of intrinsic motivation and internalization are natural in us, but they require nutriments. It is similar to plants: put a seed in the ground and it is natural for the seed to grow. But it requires water and sun to grow optimally. Humans require satisfaction of the three psychological needs (and also of course they require satisfaction of the biological needs such as food) in order to grow and develop in a healthy and optimal way. It turns out also, that the processes related to autonomy and control can operate both consciously and nonconsciously. So, your questioned distinction between the needs being non-conscious and the types of motivation being conscious is not quite right. People can be conscious of the fact that they need relatedness, competence, and autonomy, for example, and further they can also be autonomous as well as controlled with the regulatory processes being non-conscious. So, the needs describe the necessary nutriments for being autonomously motivated. When the needs are satisfied (which you may or may not be consciously aware of at a given time) you will be more autonomously motivated. Now, let s have a look at the role of the environment, which I will only briefly mention in this go round. Specifically, the environment plays a very important role in a person s need satisfaction. Some environments are very supportive of people s need satisfaction, and some are not. Parents can be warm and caring (providing satisfaction of their children s relatedness need) and allow their children s initiations and choice (providing satisfaction of their children s autonomy need) and acknowledge their children s effectiveness (providing satisfaction of their children s competence need) in which case the children will display more

5 autonomous motivation and a range of positive consequences. Alternatively, the parents can be cold, rejecting, demanding, controlling, critical, and demeaning, in which case the children will be controlled, or even worse the children will lose all their motivation and will be what we call amotivated. So, amotivation means having little or no autonomous motivation or controlled motivation, and it results from all three of a person s psychological needs being strongly thwarted. Stefan: Ok great, thank you for enlightening me regarding conscious and unconscious needs and motives. Actually, now that you say it, it seems quite clear that we can be very much aware of our needs as well as we sometimes can act unaware of our motives for doing it. Regarding our needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, as I understand it, they need to be satisfied in order for us to be autonomously motivated, either in the purest sense of intrinsic motivation or in an integrated form in which a behavior that was previously externally motivated (tangible or social carrot/stick) has been deeply internalized representing an authentic part of our self and our deeply held values. Introjection on the other hand is a less internalized motive than integration in the sense that it is still contingent on other forces than one s self image and values. To make this clear for myself and for the readers of our conversation I would like to try to give an example, before digging deeper in to the importance of the social environment, and please once again, correct me if I am out in the blue. Let us take my behavior at this specific moment, namely reading your previous answer, reflecting on it and writing back to you. It can have a number of possible motives based on what you have described above. First and foremost, which of course seem highly unlikely but anyway, just to exemplify, I could be amotivated. If that was the case I guess that I would be surrounded by colleagues here at the Centre for Leadership who were cold, rejecting, critical, mean etc. and that you in your answers to me would be as well. As anyone who knows my colleagues and/or read your answers can tell, this is certainly not the case. Anyway, if that was the case, I guess that I would postpone my reply as long as possible, feeling neither joy nor excitement doing it. I would probably have no other explanation for actually writing a reply than I don t know why I m doing it, I don t enjoy it, but I don t know what else to do. This leads to the next possibility, which would be that I am mostly externally motivated to reply on your previous answer. It could be in the sense that I get paid for it, that I would like to receive praise from you for asking such brilliant questions, that I want to avoid blame from colleagues or readers for having done a lousy job, that I don t want to upset you for having to wait for my reply etc. My motive for replying would not come from within, but rather from outside in the form of an experienced external control of my behavior. If I was purely externally motivated I guess that I would not feel any particular joy or excitement in the process of writing, but instead would do it just for the carrot or the stick. Anyway, based on your answer above, I guess that I would need to have at least some of my psychological needs met in order to be able to feel any motivation at all, even if purely external. The next kind of motivation could be that neither of the above mentioned tangible or social rewards or punishments from either you, my colleagues and/or readers were at my mind as motives for my reply on your mail, but I anyway felt an internal pressure (i. e., I have to.or I should) to do it, maybe in the sense of feeling bad and ashamed if I did not do it and/or that I had to do it in order to feel good about myself. In this case the control of my behavior would not come from outside, but rather from inside (internal pressure, anxiety, guilt etc.) in the form of an introjection. Anyway, I would still feel controlled to perform the behavior of writing you a reply. I guess that my behavior in that case, for an outside observer, could look like responsible and

6 authentic as there was no explicit external reason that they could attribute as reason for my behavior. Anyway, they could only see my visible behavior, and wouldn t know that I did not actually enjoy doing it but only did it out of reaching inner peace. If the behavior of replying on your were even more internalized than was the case in the above example, it would be integrated such that replying to your was something that I wanted to do, not because I felt any external or internal pressure, but because I felt that it was the right thing to do, and/or the way to behave that best represents the view that I hold, and want to hold, about myself. For an outside observer it is not sure that they could tell the difference whether my behavior was introjected or integrated. If someone, on the other hand, asked me directly I would now describe my behavior as something that I really wanted to do because I saw some meaning in it based on my ideals and my values (i. e., by replying I contribute to spread valuable knowledge about motivation) and because it was an authentic expression of myself (i. e., I am a person who wants to take responsibility for myself and for others, and I want to take responsibility by actively contributing in this conversation). In this case my motive for replying would be autonomous as I did not feel any pressure or obligations to do it, but instead did it because I wanted to and chose to. The final possible reason for replying to your , would be that I was intrinsically motivated to do it. In that case the act of reading your answers, reflecting on them, thinking and preparing for my next question etc., would be gratifying in itself. The pure activity would be fun, exciting, challenging, enjoyable and satisfying. I guess I could easily loose myself in the activity just for the fun of it. This is autonomous motivation in its purest form. Without a doubt my true motivation for replying are autonomous (mostly intrinsic but also highly integrated), and I feel great enjoyment doing it. Well, that was a long example just to make clear for myself and for others the differences between various kinds of motivation. My main issue so far in the interview has been to ask you about the basics of motivation before we move on to talk more specific about motivation in the organizational context and how to apply these theories in order to create the best conditions for needs fulfillment and autonomous motivation. But first three more basic questions that you can answer in the same mail: Can you tell me a little more about the relationship between needs fulfillment and motivation, or actually, do the three needs differ in any sense with respect to what kind of motivation they can lead to when met or when thwarted? Which needs have to be met in order to have any motivation at all and which needs have to be met in order to have autonomous motivation? How are the different kinds of motivation related to performance? How do you (as a researcher) decide what kind of motivation a person has at a specific moment? Are there various methods of measuring motivation? Ed: First, let me say, Stefan, that your example was an excellent one. You got the gist of this. I would add just one thing. Technically, there is actually a fifth type of motivation in this scheme. Most readers would not need it, and could stick with just what is above, but I will mention it just in case someone goes to our academic publications and gets confused. The other type is called Identification, and it is on the continuum between introjection and integration. It involves identifying with the importance of a behavior, but not yet fully

7 integrating that identification with other parts of oneself. It is a pretty autonomous type of motivation. So, I just mention it. It helps solve some theoretical issues, but we don t need to be concerned with it for our discussions of applied domains. Now for your first new question. The general statement is that thwarting of any need will have negative psychological well-being effects of some sort. But your question asks for relations between specific needs and specific motivations or outcomes. First, it is satisfaction versus thwarting of the autonomy need that tells whether or not a person s motivation will be autonomous or controlled. Having some competence satisfaction is necessary for either type of motivation. Without competence satisfaction with respect to a behavior there will likely be amotivation for that behavior. So competence satisfaction is necessary for motivated behavior and both competence and autonomy satisfaction are necessary for autonomously motivated behavior. Now, as for relatedness, some ongoing sense of being related to others is necessary for motivation, but it does not always need to be proximal; it can be more distal. By that I mean, people need to have a general sense of being connected to some others in order not to be depressed and amotivated, but they do not need to have interactions with others in order to be intrinsically motivated for a task sometimes it is nice to be alone to read a book or take a walk in the woods. But if you had absolutely no relatedness satisfaction in your life, you would probably not be very motivated to do these things or any other constructive activities. Satisfaction of the relatedness need has been found to be especially strong as a predictor of relational kinds of things. For example, satisfaction of the relatedness need was the strongest among the three satisfactions as a predictor of feeling securely attached to others, although autonomy satisfaction was also a strong predictor of security of attachment to others. Still, in general, there has not been a lot of research relating satisfaction of the specific needs to specific motivations or outcomes. Second, you asked about the relations of the different kinds of motivation to performance. For starters, almost all of the research has looked at autonomous motivation versus controlled motivation as predictors, so I will start there. In general, autonomous motivation has been found to be a strong positive predictor of outcomes that involve heuristic processes that is, those that involve deeper kinds of thinking and more creative or conceptual engagement with an activity. So, for example, we found in one study that when people were high in autonomous motivation they learned conceptual material much better than when they were low in autonomous motivation. Similarly, when people were high in autonomous motivation they were much more creative. When they were high in autonomous motivation, they also displayed much better psychological health and well-being. In contrast, when people were controlled in their motivation, they tended to do better in rote memorization, but only over the short run that is, they memorized more, but they also soon forgot more. Controlled motivation did not predict deeper learning or psychological well-being, although there is evidence of some ill-being when people are high on controlled motivation. This general set of findings about performance being more effective when people are autonomous rather than controlled in their motivation is very rigorous. There has been only a little bit of research comparing the more specific types of motivations. One interesting result in this sense is that when at task requires some discipline and determination for example, practicing tennis rather than playing tennis it turns out that integrated motivation is a better predictor than intrinsic motivation. Both of those kinds of motivation are autonomous and have a lot of similar consequences, but intrinsic motivation is a better predictor of doing things that are fun and enjoyable, whereas integrated motivation is a better predictor of things that are important and need disciplined responding.

8 Your final new question asks how we measure kinds of motivation at a specific moment. There are ways to set up a situation where people are free to do what they want when there are some options available to them. Suppose you want to measure people s intrinsic motivation for working with a puzzle. You make the puzzle available to them along with other interesting options, and you measure how much time during some set period of time they spend with the puzzles. This would indicate how intrinsically motivated a target person is relative to other people in that situation. This is one way we measure it in experiments, but it is often harder to do in the real world. So, we also measure autonomous motivation with questionnaires. There are some questionnaires developed by Rich Ryan and Jim Connell that focus on autonomous versus controlled motivation for a particular activity or domain of activities, and there are others that measure autonomous versus controlled motivation in general in a person s life. These various questionnaires get used in our research also. Stefan: Ok, thank you Ed, this last answer of yours brings us more specifically to our main theme of this conversation, namely motivation at work. As I see it the organizations in which people work are social entities that have a major risk or opportunity to either thwart or satisfy the basic needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness and thereby influence people s work motivation. The kind of motivation in turn has been found to be a strong predictor of our well being, development and performance such that autonomous motivation is positively related to these valuable outcomes while controlled motivation is neutrally (at best) or even negatively related to the same outcomes. From this point of view it seems quite self evident that knowledge about human motivation could, if applied wisely, have a positive impact on hard outcomes such as job performance as well as soft outcomes such as well being and job satisfaction, outcomes of great importance for the employee as well as for the employer. When we work with leaders and organizations this is actually one of the major goals of ours, namely to support our clients to create conditions that enhances the possibility that people in their organization or work group will do a good job and perform well, not because they feel that they have to but, instead, because they feel that they want to. I would like to talk to you about how to create these conditions for autonomous motivation at work, and more specifically, how to deal with these issues at various levels of the organization, namely: Individual level Group/team level Direct leadership level Strategic leadership level/organizational level I will of course describe what I mean with each level along our conversation, but let s take one thing at a time and start at the individual level. The first question I would like to ask concerns potential individual differences in motivation regardless of the social surrounding. It seems quite reasonable to me that some individuals, however supporting the work environment is, still feel pretty much controlled while others, working under the worst imaginable conditions, still feel totally autonomous and self-determined. Is there any empirical evidence of such individual differences? Ed: Good question, Stefan. Yes, there are indeed individual differences. Rich Ryan and I refer to them as causality orientations, but really they are motivational orientations. We use the term causality orientations because

9 they have to do with the causes of your behavior, and with how you orient toward the environment in terms of the causes of your behavior. Let me explain. There are three causality orientations, and we view them as global level individual differences or personality characteristics. The first is the autonomy orientation. It refers to being generally autonomous in your motivation and actions, and also to viewing the environment or context as need supportive and as a source of useful information in choosing how to behave. So, when high in the autonomy orientation you would not feel controlled by the environment, you would not just see it as pressuring you, but rather you would decide how to behave and you would use the available information in making your choice. The second orientation is the controlled orientation. It refers to being generally controlled in your behavior and looking to the environment or context as a source of control, as something that is pressuring you to think, feel, or behave in specific ways. The environment then, is not viewed as a source of information that can inform your choices, but instead is viewed as something that is controlling you. When you are high in the autonomy orientation you would, to some degree, be able to see the environment as informational and need supportive even when it is quite controlling. And when you are high in the controlled orientation you would, to some degree, be controlled by the environment even if it is need supportive and informational. The third orientation is the impersonal orientation. It refers to being generally amotivated and viewing the environment or context as something that is giving you signals that you are incompetent and not able to do the job at hand. Now, there are several important points to be made about these orientations. First, we each have all three orientations to some extent, so the key issue is which are stronger and which are less strong. We have a measure called the General Causality Orientations Scale, and it gives a person a score on each orientation. There have been many studies using these causality orientation scores, and the studies have shown that the orientations do predict many different kinds of outcomes. Second, these orientations are learned over time as a function of our developmental experiences. For example, if you grew up in a home that was very controlling and went to a school that is very controlling, you would likely have developed a very strong controlled orientation, so you would likely have relatively little intrinsic motivation and your extrinsic motivation would likely be pretty external and introjected. If you grew up in more need-supportive environments, you would likely have developed a strong autonomy orientation. And similarly for amotivating environments and the impersonal orientation. Third, the causality orientations are not absolute in the sense that if you are very strongly controlled in your orientation you would not be able to detect some autonomy support in the environment if it were there. The environment does matter too; it is just that the orientations do, to some degree, color how you view the environment. Thus, over time, your causality orientations can to some degree change over time even when you are an adult. If you were pretty high in the controlled orientation but worked in a very autonomysupportive environment (i.e., a need supportive one) you would likely become gradually less controlled and more autonomous in your orientations. [As a side note, the process of psychotherapy can, to a meaningful degree, be viewed as a process in which an autonomy-supportive therapeutic context will help people become more autonomous and less controlled.] OK, that said, these individual differences and also the quality of the environment both play a role in people s performance ( hard outcome) and their well-being and satisfaction (the softer outcomes). For example, Paul Baard, Rich Ryan, and I did a study once of bankers, and we measured both their own causality orientations and also the degree to which the work environment (e.g., the workgroup) was need-supportive.

10 We found that the degree to which the people were stronger in their autonomous causality orientation and the degree to which the environment was autonomy-supportive both contributed to their performance ratings and to their sense of well-being. The environment was a stronger predictor than the individual differences, but the autonomous orientation was also a statistically significant predictor. It further turns out that autonomy support is helpful for people even if they have a very strong controlled orientation. People sometime say, If your employee is controlled in his or her orientation, then you should control him and that will lead to the best results. However, that is generally not true. Control has negative effects even on people who are controlled in their orientation, and autonomy support has positive effects even on people who are controlled in their orientation. Stefan: Ed, this last answer of yours is of true interest for me as I at the moment am writing on a new book on what constitutes good followership and how to promote good followership development, and from your description of the autonomy orientation I think that this personality trait might fit well with my view of a good follower (i.e., responsible, committed, self-determined, relates well to others, and has the courage to constructively challenge authority if needed). I guess that an autonomy oriented follower can influence the environment (for instance a leader) to be more autonomy supportive as well as the other way around (leader influence on the follower) which creates an optimal interaction between leader and follower. Do you think that this seems reasonable, and if you do, what would you suggest to an individual asking for your advice about how to influence his or her environment (for example his or her manager) to be more autonomy supportive? Ed: All relationships between an authority and another person are two-directional. The authority affects the motivation and behavior of the other, and it work in the opposite direction as well. Parents affect their children s motivation and behavior, and the children also have an impact on their parents motivation and behavior. Same is true for managers and their subordinates. Mangers have an effect on their employees motivation and behavior, and the employees also affect the managers motivation and behavior. Usually, we look at the one direction that is, at the influence of the managers on their subordinates because part of managers jobs is to motivate and influence their subordinates. Much of our earlier discussion was directly relevant to this point, because we considered the difference between the impact on subordinates of managers who were autonomy-supportive versus controlling. However, the astute employees understand that the way they speak and behave affects how their managers will relate to and manage them. The employees can then use that information to their own advantage. Employees who are resistant, who argue and criticize their managers, will reliably pull controlling styles out of their managers, making the managers more controlling than they typically are. When employees get defensive and blame others, their managers will exert their authority and treat them controllingly you can be sure of it. So, start with the realization that employees who point fingers, deny that they did what they did, and are moody or insistent will be inviting their managers to show their worst sides. What is the alternative? Do your best to maintain a positive attitude, so you speak to your manager in a respectful way, just as the best managers speak to their subordinates in a respectful way. Then, give some thought to what your boss s circumstances are like. Managers too are likely to be under pressure and stress, and our research shows that when authorities are pressured and controlled they are likely to turn around and pressure and control their subordinates. What can you do about it? For example, you could offer to help out your manager with various jobs that need to be done. Your manager will probably appreciate it. Make

11 suggestions for improving things when the time is right, but do so in an upbeat way (not an irritated way). And be sure that the way you make the suggestions does not imply that your manager was wrong. I ve been thinking about that problem we ran into this morning and I wonder what might happen if we tried dealing with it by, you could say to your manager, for example. The bottom line, really, is for you to try to imagine yourself as the manager and think about how you would like your employees to behave toward you. And when things have gone a little wrong between you and your manager try to get a sense of how your manager would have experienced what you did. As you get more insight into how your manager sees you, you will be in a better position to begin encouraging the better sides of your manager the autonomy-supportive sides to come to the foreground. Further, employees who have tracked their managers behavior may come to realize that there are times or circumstances when it is best to keep a low profile. Maybe certain days of the week possibly a day when something difficult typically happens in the morning before work (the spouse has to leave early for work that day and that creates tension at home), or a day when your manager always has a meeting with his or her boss are probably bad days to approach your manager. Employees who are themselves autonomy oriented will be better at doing all this it will come more naturally to them. So, give some thought to what it means to be autonomy oriented, and that will give you clues about how to draw autonomy-support out of your manager. That means taking initiative, and thinking about better or more-efficient ways of doing your job. Why? Because that is what autonomy-oriented individuals do, and doing it that way is likely to have a positive impact on your manager. Will it always work? Not always. Some managers are more controlling and more rigid than others. But it will go a long way with most managers, and you will be the one who will reap the benefits. In fact, your peers might reap some of the benefits too. Stefan: Ok, so it seems quite possible for an individual to influence his or her social environment to be more autonomy supportive, for instance by acting the same way as someone high in autonomy orientation (for example taking initiative and offering solutions to better ways of doing the job). This, I guess, will come more natural for someone who is authentically autonomy oriented than for someone who has a controlled orientation but tries to behave in an autonomy oriented way. Have the General Causality Orientations Scale been used in any recruitment procedures that you know of, as I guess that every employee should be interested in recruiting autonomy oriented people? Ed: All of our psychometric instruments, including the General Causality Orientations Scale (GCOS) have been designed as research instruments and validated as research instruments. Thus, there are no high stakes associated with people s responses to these questions when they are completing them for research purposes. They complete the questionnaires with the belief that they can provide truthful answers and that there will be no negative consequences of any sort associated with their responses. We do not know what would happen if the instruments were used as selection devices because we have never used them in that way, or any comparable way. Presumably, if people were completing these as part of a job interview, they would be oriented toward providing socially acceptable answers, so the responses would not be the most truthful answers. Certainly, you would not get people providing very high impersonal responses, and I would guess that you would get responses that are higher on the autonomy orientation than would

12 reflect their true autonomy orientation. To validate questionnaires as diagnostic instruments requires a different type of validation than is the case for research instruments. Further, even the way the questions are asked, and the kinds of items included are likely to be somewhat different. So, the bottom line is that I would not recommend the GCOS for use in job selection. Stefan: That seems reasonable, what is a valid and reliable instrument when used for research purposes is not necessarily so when used in a context in which the person has personal gains at stake. So, to briefly summarize, your research has shown that there are individual (i.e., personality) differences in motivational (or causality) orientations such that some individuals have a propensity to be generally autonomy motivated, while others are more controlled in their overall behavior. Still others are generally amotivated. People who are autonomy oriented or act as if they were so, can have an influence on their environment to be more need supportive, whereas controlled oriented people influence others to exert more control on them. This demonstrates the mutual dependency between leaders and followers in the leadership process very clear, where the behavior of one part is always at least partly dependent upon the behavior of the other part and vice versa. Autonomy supportive leaders increase autonomy motivated behaviors on behalf of their subordinates, and such autonomy motivated behaviors in turn increase the willingness for leaders to be autonomy supportive. On the other hand controlling leader behaviors (which we will talk about much more later on in the interview) increase controlled motivation in subordinates who act accordingly which in turn increase the tendency further for leaders to exert more control. From this reasoning one could easily see that subordinates, or followers, play an important part in the leadership process and that individual followers who act in an autonomy oriented fashion can have a positive influence on their leaders behaviors while at the same time performing well (particularly at intellectually complex tasks demanding creativity and problem solving) and feeling good about themselves and their behavior. Increasing the level of autonomous motivation in individuals obviously seems a worthy goal for any organizational consultant wanting to help their client organization. As much (not to say most) work in organizations of today is organized around work groups or teams, and job performance accordingly often is measured at this group/team level, I become curious if motivation can be studied (and enhanced/transformed for that sake) at this level of analysis as well, as some kind of group- or teambased motivation (autonomous or controlled). This, I know, has been done with other related psychological constructs, such as for example selfefficacy which at the group level is called collective efficacy or group efficacy. What are your thoughts regarding a group- or team level motivation, does it make any sense at all? Ed: Our tendency is to recognize that all motivation resides in people, so I think about individuals being autonomous or controlled for example. However, I also think that people interact and a group of interacting people who are high in autonomy will be a very effectively functioning group--a group that you might think of as an autonomous group--and this group will be very different from one that is made up of people who are all high on controlled motivation. Further, if there is a kind of norm for autonomy, it will help people in the group be more autonomous. So, it is certainly the case that groups differ in the degree to which the dominant orientation of its members is autonomous, and groups that are more generally autonomous will generally be more effective. I wouldn t mind someone describing such a group as a high-autonomy group. But I continue to

13 believe that it is important to think about each individual in terms of his or her motivation, recognizing that the group can have a strong and important influence on the person s motivation. If the group generally functions autonomously and people in it are autonomy supportive of the members, then the members as a whole will tend to be autonomous and you will have a high-functioning, autonomy-oriented group. Stefan: Groups and group processes can have a tremendous impact on people s thoughts, feelings and actions, sometimes for good and, surely, sometimes for worse, probably not least because they can, in a powerful way help satisfy our basic psychological needs. Do you know about any studies that, in particular, have studied on the impact of group/team processes on motivation? Ed: In one sense, many of our studies have done that. We have studied classrooms, work groups, and health-care clinics, for example, examining their impact on the motivation and behavior of the students, employees, and patients in those settings. The impact is great, but in these groups there is typically one or more authority figure whose orientation and behavior is often the most important influence on the group members and it is that influence that is generally studied. That is of course quite different from examining a working group as a whole, and trying either (1) to characterize the group itself in terms of its motivational orientation, or (2) examine the effect of the overall group on its individual members. In grappling with these two issues, one has to be clear about the issue of authority. Is there a leader of the group that holds the position because of the structure of the organization that is, because he or she is the boss of the group? That will make the dynamic different from a group of equals in which the leader emerges. I am not sure what types of groups you have in mind in asking the question. That said, I also have to say that I am not familiar with research on groups. It is a huge research area, and I do not follow it. I can be pretty sure however that there are no studies of motivation from an SDT perspective in which the group is the focus in either of the two ways specified in the last paragraph. Stefan: The vast majority of work groups that I meet actually have one or more formal managers or leaders so the importance of leadership for individuals' motivation is of course of great interest. This is also what I primarily want to talk about because almost all the missions we undertake include actions against managers and leaders at different levels of the client organizations. The reason I am interested in the connection between group dynamics and motivation is that I believe that properties of the group could possibly serve as a moderator to the relationship between leadership and motivation. In practice this means that certain types of conditions or properties in the group makes a specific leader behavior less likely to have any impact on individuals' behavior (and probably motivation), whereas other types of conditions in the group strengthens the importance of the leader behaviors. Although research on this issue is quite sparse, there are some research within the so-called social identity paradigm that suggest that the leader/manager needs to be seen as prototypical for the group's properties in order to be able to have a positive impact on the group and in order to be generally perceived by the group as their leader and not only as a formal manager. The leader/manager for a group should therefore, in order to have a positive impact on motivation and performance, get to know the group and their ideals, values and behavioral norms and thereafter in accordance with this make sure to be a good role model in his or her own conduct. This is of course not as easy as it might sound as the appointed leader often has his or her own