What are the main drivers in your life? For example, what motivates you to action at work? Do you enjoy what you do at work, and do you put in extra effort beyond the minimum required? Or do you find your job boring and it is all you can do to stay focused on job tasks? There are many theories of motivation that try to answer this question including self-determination theory. But what is self-determination theory and how does it explain our behavior?
What Is Motivation?
Motivation is the driving force behind our behavior. It is the reason that we do what we do. Motivation can mobilize our activities in three ways.
- Direction has to do with our choice of where to invest our efforts. Do we spend the morning reading a novel or doing a workout on our Peloton bike?
- Intensity has to do with the amount of effort we expend on the task we are doing. Do we ride our Peloton slowly or quickly?
- Persistence is the amount of time we spend on the activity. Do we ride for 10 minutes or 2 hours?
There are two types of motivation that are important in understanding motivation. Extrinsic motivation occurs when we do something to gain reward or to avoid punishment. We work at our jobs for the pay and benefits. We wear our seatbelts to avoid injury in an accident. We might go to work even if we hate our jobs and the tasks we do. We wear our seatbelts even though not wearing them is more comfortable.
Intrinsic motivation means we engage in an activity because we enjoy it. This is the case with many leisure activities that we do just because we like them. This can also be the case with work activities that we find enjoyable. I enjoy writing blog articles because I find writing to be intrinsically motivating.
Many of the activities we perform have elements of both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Most of us work because we need to pay and benefits, but we can still enjoy much of what we do at work and find at least some of our tasks intrinsically motivating.
What Is Self-Determination Theory?
The basic idea of self-determination theory is that everyone has three main needs that motivate us:
- Autonomy is the need to control your environment. People can feel stressed when they lose control of their lives and will be motivated to assert that control. This is one reason that people will sometimes refuse to comply when someone tries to force them to do something, even if that something is in their best interest.
- Competence is the need to accomplish meaningful things in life. People want to feel that they are good performers in at least some domains of life. No one wants to feel like a failure because they are unable to do anything well.
- Relatedness is the need to have positive relationships with other people. This includes intimate relationships, friendships, and good working relationships.
Activities that enable us to fulfill these needs will be intrinsically motivating because they do not only provide external rewards. People will do more than just the minimum required if they are intrinsically motivated.
How Leaders Can Apply Self-Determination Theory
Self-determination theory tells organizational leaders that they should focus on meeting follower needs in order to maximize their motivation. This means focusing on the three need areas.
- Autonomy: Empower employees by allowing them autonomy to the extent possible. This involves allowing employees to decide how, when, and where to accomplish tasks, and if possible even allow latitude about what tasks to do. Setting goals with employees and then holding people accountable for accomplishing those goals is a way to enhance motivation. A highly successful CEO told me that he discovered the best way to motivate employees was to focus on goal accomplishment and not on the steps employees took to meet goals.
- Competence: An important motivational tool is to invest in employees to build their knowledge and skill at work. It is important to provide training, but often a better way is to provide assignments that allow employees to grow. Those assignments need to be challenging, but not beyond the capability of the employee. A series of increasingly challenging tasks can build talent while providing successes that meet competence needs.
- Relatedness: It is important at work to create a supportive organizational climate that encourages good working relationships among employees. Building a climate of psychological safety where everyone is free to express opinions and be themselves helps people meet their relatedness needs. Leaders should provide effective support for followers that not only helps with performing job tasks, but deals with personal issues as well.
Good leadership means motivating employees by meeting their basic needs at work. The leader who can answer what is self-determination theory has a valuable tool that can enhance motivation by making work better for employees.
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Thanks, Paul! that’s one of my favorite theories…I use with masters students. fits well in organizations. For a good while, Deci and Ryan were not getting much traction in the IO space but, as you know, that’s changed.
SDT is a good tool for consultants to have in their tool box.
Thanks for posting that…such a clear, concise explanation!
Tom Mitchell, U Baltimore
Thank you Paul for giving insights into self-determination theory.. liked the intrinsic motivation part, should know and work on it.
Thanks Paul. You explained SDT very well and powerfully illustrated its application.
Very similar to Socio-analytical Theory of Personality, just in reverse order (not that I think the order is that important in either theory).
The difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation comes down to one question.
What is an incentive or reinforcer?
For a Skinnerian behaviorist, a reinforcer is any event virtual or real that changes any attribute of behavior, from rate to intensity to form.
For a biological behaviorist, a reinforcer is a positive change in a specific neurologic state that is embodied by an affective tone or feeling.
For the Skinnerian, all reinforcement is extrinsic, and is justified procedurally. For the biological behaviorist, all reinforcement is intrinsic, and is justified realistically, or through an understanding of how the brain works. Either perspective denies separate categorical entities of extrinsic and intrinsic reward. Ultimately however, a sound neurologically grounded explanation of incentive motivation resolves the distinction, which given our current knowledge, is that there is no distinction at all.
The concept of a unified reinforcement theory was proposed by the bio-behaviorists John Donahoe and David Palmer in 1994, and was independently confirmed by the affective neuroscientist Kent Berridge (who added the affective nature of reinforcement) in the same and following decades. Donahoe and Palmer proposed a neurologically grounded definition of reinforcement. Reinforcement reflected a discrepancy principle, when behavior is continually mediated by the activity of dopamine neurons elicited by continuous correction error between predictions and outcomes. Dopamine scales with the importance of the reinforcer, and is responsible for a feeling of energy and arousal, but not pleasure. The reinforcement principle from a Skinnerian behaviorism is still the guiding principle of present-day behaviorists or behavior analysts, but discrepancy principles are now core to single process incentive motivation theories in radical behaviorism as reflected by modern affective neuroscience.
The difference between these two principles is stark in both principle and practice. Whereas a Skinnerian behaviorist is concerned about the effectiveness of reinforcers, a biological or radical behaviorist Is concerned about how reinforcement induces affect. To a teacher, parent, society, or politic, the effectiveness of reinforcement is paramount. However, for an individual, affect in reinforcement is of first importance, as we generally don’t want to do anything unless we ‘feel’ like it. The latter is reflected in the recent work of Berridge, who emphasized that behavior change must be oriented to eliciting continuous positive affect, which is epitomized by an active and meaningful life. Given this perspective where individual feelings are critical for motivation and positive affect or ‘happiness’, the metric for success for biological behaviorists is not behavioral control, but individual freedom, and a behaviorally engineered society that focuses on constructing the avenues that enrich the meaning or value of life, or an individual’s fully realized self-control in a free society.
John Donahoe: Behavior Analysis and Neuroscience
https://www.scribd.com/document/426400833/Behavior-Analysis-and-Neuroscience-1
The Joyful Mind: Kringelbach and Berridge
https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/wp-content/uploads/sites/743/2019/10/Kringelbach-Berridge-2012-Joyful-mind-Sci-Am.pdf
‘A Mouse’s Tale’ Learning theory for a lay audience from the perspective of modern affective neuroscience
https://www.scribd.com/document/495438436/A-Mouse-s-Tale-a-practical-explanation-and-handbook-of-motivation-from-the-perspective-of-a-humble-creature
Berridge article on history of learning theory
https://www.scribd.com/document/447163649/Berridge-Reward-Learning-Incentives-and-Expectations
Berridge Lab
https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/