scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Journal ArticleDOI

The "What" and "Why" of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior

01 Jan 2000-Psychological Inquiry (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.)-Vol. 11, Iss: 4, pp 227-268
TL;DR: Self-Determination Theory (SDT) as mentioned in this paper maintains that an understanding of human motivation requires a consideration of innate psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness, emphasizing that needs specify the necessary conditions for psychological growth, integrity, and well-being.
Abstract: Self-determination theory (SDT) maintains that an understanding of human motivation requires a consideration of innate psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. We discuss the SDT concept of needs as it relates to previous need theories, emphasizing that needs specify the necessary conditions for psychological growth, integrity, and well-being. This concept of needs leads to the hypotheses that different regulatory processes underlying goal pursuits are differentially associated with effective functioning and well-being and also that different goal contents have different relations to the quality of behavior and mental health, specifically because different regulatory processes and different goal contents are associated with differing degrees of need satisfaction. Social contexts and individual differences that support satisfaction of the basic needs facilitate natural growth processes including intrinsically motivated behavior and integration of extrinsic motivations, whereas those that forestall autonomy, competence, or relatedness are associated with poorer motivation, performance, and well-being. We also discuss the relation of the psychological needs to cultural values, evolutionary processes, and other contemporary motivation theories.

Content maybe subject to copyright    Report

Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This review considers research from both perspectives concerning the nature of well-being, its antecedents, and its stability across time and culture.
Abstract: ▪ Abstract Well-being is a complex construct that concerns optimal experience and functioning. Current research on well-being has been derived from two general perspectives: the hedonic approach, which focuses on happiness and defines well-being in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance; and the eudaimonic approach, which focuses on meaning and self-realization and defines well-being in terms of the degree to which a person is fully functioning. These two views have given rise to different research foci and a body of knowledge that is in some areas divergent and in others complementary. New methodological developments concerning multilevel modeling and construct comparisons are also allowing researchers to formulate new questions for the field. This review considers research from both perspectives concerning the nature of well-being, its antecedents, and its stability across time and culture.

8,243 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors describes self-determination theory as a theory of work motivation and shows its relevance to theories of organizational behavior, which has received widespread attention in the education, health care, and sport domains.
Abstract: Cognitive evaluation theory, which explains the effects of extrinsic motivators on intrinsic motivation, received some initial attention in the organizational literature. However, the simple dichotomy between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation made the theory difficult to apply to work settings. Differentiating extrinsic motivation into types that differ in their degree of autonomy led to self-determination theory, which has received widespread attention in the education, health care, and sport domains. This article describes self-determination theory as a theory of work motivation and shows its relevance to theories of organizational behavior. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

5,816 citations


Cites background from "The "What" and "Why" of Goal Pursui..."

  • ...…motivated behavior can become autonomous, together with research on individual differences in causality orientations (Deci & Ryan, 1985b), led to the formulation of self-determination theory (SDT) (Deci & Ryan, 1985a, 2000; Ryan & Deci, 2000), which incorporated CET but is much broader in scope....

    [...]

  • ...Specifically, Deci et al. (1994) found that a ‘meaningful rationale’ is one of the important factors that facilitates integrated internalization, and Latham, Erez, and Locke (1988) found that it facilitates goal acceptance....

    [...]

  • ...Many studies guided by SDT have provided support for this perspective (see Deci & Ryan, 2000, for a review)....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Authentic Leadership Development (ALD) as mentioned in this paper is an emerging field of research in the field of leadership development, with a focus on transforming, charismatic, servant, and spiritual leadership perspectives.
Abstract: This Special Issue is the result of the inaugural summit hosted by the Gallup Leadership Institute at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2004 on Authentic Leadership Development (ALD). We describe in this introduction to the special issue current thinking in this emerging field of research as well as questions and concerns. We begin by considering some of the environmental and organizational forces that may have triggered interest in describing and studying authentic leadership and its development. We then provide an overview of its contents, including the diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives presented, followed by a discussion of alternative conceptual foundations and definitions for the constructs of authenticity, authentic leaders, authentic leadership, and authentic leadership development. A detailed description of the components of authentic leadership theory is provided next. The similarities and defining features of authentic leadership theory in comparison to transformational, charismatic, servant and spiritual leadership perspectives are subsequently examined. We conclude by discussing the status of authentic leadership theory with respect to its purpose, construct definitions, historical foundations, consideration of context, relational/processual focus, attention to levels of analysis and temporality, along with a discussion of promising directions for future research.

3,866 citations


Cites background from "The "What" and "Why" of Goal Pursui..."

  • ...Most similar to our view is Ilies et al.’s (2005) model, the theoretical foundations of which are likewise anchored in part by the work of Kernis (2003) and Deci and Ryan (1995, 2000)....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ) as mentioned in this paper is a 10-item measure of the presence of, and the search for, meaning in life, which was developed to measure the emotional well-being of counseling patients.
Abstract: Counseling psychologists often work with clients to increase their well-being as well as to decrease their distress. One important aspect of well-being, highlighted particularly in humanistic theories of the counseling process, is perceived meaning in life. However, poor measurement has hampered research on meaning in life. In 3 studies, evidence is provided for the internal consistency, temporal stability, factor structure, and validity of the Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ), a new 10-item measure of the presence of, and the search for, meaning in life. A multitrait-multimethod matrix demonstrates the convergent and discriminant validity of the MLQ subscales across time and informants, in comparison with 2 other meaning scales. The MLQ offers several improvements over current meaning in life measures, including no item overlap with distress measures, a stable factor structure, better discriminant validity, a briefer format, and the ability to measure the search for meaning.

3,066 citations


Cites background from "The "What" and "Why" of Goal Pursui..."

  • ...pleasant affect, meaning is important, whether as a critical component (Ryff & Singer, 1998) or as a result of maximizing one’s potentials (e.g., Deci & Ryan, 2000; Maslow, 1971)....

    [...]

  • ...…American Psychological Association 2006, Vol. 53, No. 1, 80–93 0022-0167/06/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0022-0167.53.1.80 80 pleasant affect, meaning is important, whether as a critical component (Ryff & Singer, 1998) or as a result of maximizing one’s potentials (e.g., Deci & Ryan, 2000; Maslow, 1971)....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed a 4-phase model of interest development, which describes four phases in the development and deepening of learner interest: triggered situational interest, maintained interest, emerging (less developed) individual interest, and well-developed individual interest.
Abstract: Building on and extending existing research, this article proposes a 4-phase model of interest development. The model describes 4 phases in the development and deepening of learner interest: triggered situational interest, maintained situational interest, emerging (less-developed) individual interest, and well-developed individual interest. Affective as well as cognitive factors are considered. Educational implications of the proposed model are identified.

3,014 citations


Cites background from "The "What" and "Why" of Goal Pursui..."

  • ...In self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985, 2000; Ryan & Deci, 2000), a person’s ability to satisfybasic psychological needs is a function of his or her valued outcomes, or goals. est for content (e.g., facilitation), then related new content, opportunities, or challenge provides additional…...

    [...]

  • ...…Linnebrink & Pintrich, 2000; Molden & Dweck, 2002; Pintrich, 2000), task value (Eccles et al., 1983; Wigfield & Eccles, 1992, 2002; Wigfield et al., 1997), self-efficacy (Bandura, 1986; Schunk, 1981; Zimmerman, 1989, 2000b), and intrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 1985, 2000; Ryan & Deci, 2000)....

    [...]

References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

93 citations


"The "What" and "Why" of Goal Pursui..." refers background or methods in this paper

  • ...Consider, for example, the now classic research by Olds (1958) who showed that rats, when their behavior had been entrained by the exogenous application of rewards based in electrical brain stimulation, worked themselves to exhaustion and starvation, thus neglecting important organismic needs and…...

    [...]

  • ...Most of these studies assessed self-regulation using an approach developed by Ryan and Connell (1989) in which people are asked why they engage in various behaviors (e....

    [...]

01 Jan 1990

89 citations


"The "What" and "Why" of Goal Pursui..." refers background in this paper

  • ...The achievement motive is to a substantial degree based in what we consider the innate need for competence (Koestner & McClelland, 1990), yet if one were to define the need for achievement restrictively to represent only what we call the need for competence it is likely that the need would…...

    [...]

Book
01 Jan 1989

87 citations


"The "What" and "Why" of Goal Pursui..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...These individual differences are the foci of thematic (or implicit) and questionnaire (or explicit) methods of assessment (Ryan & Manly, in press) and are used as the basis for predicting affective and behavioral outcomes (e.g., McAdams, 1989; McClelland, 1985)....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors investigated three different types of motivation: intrinsic, extrinsic, and internalized, and found that the importance children attributed to doing disliked behaviours was positively associated with internalized motivation.
Abstract: This study investigates three different types of motivation: intrinsic, extrinsic, and internalized. Open-ended interviews were conducted with 121 5- to 13-year-old children. Responses to a series of ‘why questions' about two types of behaviours (liked and disliked) were collected and used as indices of the three types of motivation. Responses were initially coded into 10 motivational categories, and then into three motivational supercategories: intrinsic, extrinsic, and internalized. Reasons falling into these three categories were then examined for hypothesized age differences and differences in the frequencies of the categories for the two classes of behaviour. Support was found for the hypothesis that liked behaviours would be intrinsically motivated across the age range. In contrast, age group differences were obtained in the motivation for disliked behaviours, with extrinsic motivation showing higher frequencies at the younger ages and internalized motivation showing higher frequencies at the older ages. The importance children attributed to doing disliked behaviours was positively associated with internalized motivation. These results suggest that intrinsic and internalized motivations are conceptually and developmentally distinct motivational sources and thus should be examined separately in research on children's motivational development.

85 citations


"The "What" and "Why" of Goal Pursui..." refers background in this paper

  • ...For example, Chandler and Connell (1987) showed that, increasingly with age, children displayed internalized regulation of behaviors that were originally externally compelled. Yet internalization, like other natural processes such as intrinsic motivation, requires nutriments to function effectively; in other words, internalization does not happen automatically. The degree to which people are able to actively synthesize cultural demands, values, and regulations and to incorporate them into the self is in large part a function of the degree to which fulfillment of the basic psychological needs is supported as they engage in the relevant behaviors. SDT proposes that people will tend naturally to internalize the values and regulations of their social groups. This tendency is facilitated by feelings of relatedness to socializing others, as well as feelings of competence with respect to the regulation being internalized. The latter includes the ability to understand or grasp the meaning or rationale behind the regulation and an ability to enact it. Supports for relatedness and competence thus facilitate internalization and can be sufficient to produce introjected values or compartmentalized (poorly integrated) identifications. However, for a regulation to become more integral to one’s self, supports for autonomy are also required. That is, although support for relatedness and competence needs may promote the internalization of a regulation or value, those supports alone will not be sufficient to foster integration. For integration to occur there must be an opportunity for the individual to freely process and endorse transmitted values and regulations (and to modify or transform them when necessary). Excessive external pressures, controls, and evaluations appear to forestall rather than facilitate this active, constructive process of giving personal meaning and valence to acquired regulations. Field research and laboratory experiments provided support for our general hypothesis. For example, Grolnick and Ryan (1989) interviewed parents of late-elementary students in their homes and then assessed the children’s motivation and internalization in their classrooms. This study revealed that the degree to which parents provided autonomy support, optimal structure, and interpersonal involvement concerning their children’s school work directly affected the extent to which the children valued and internalized the regulation of school-related activities. Parents who were rated by the interviewers as more involved and autonomy supportive had children who displayed not only more intrinsic motivation but also more internalized self-regulation for academic endeavors. In turn this was associated with enhanced performance and well-being. Subsequently, Grolnick, Ryan, and Deci (1991) showed that children’s perceptions of parental involvement and autonomy support also predicted more autonomous self-regulation....

    [...]

  • ...For example, Chandler and Connell (1987) showed that, increasingly with age, children displayed internalized regulation of behaviors that were originally externally compelled. Yet internalization, like other natural processes such as intrinsic motivation, requires nutriments to function effectively; in other words, internalization does not happen automatically. The degree to which people are able to actively synthesize cultural demands, values, and regulations and to incorporate them into the self is in large part a function of the degree to which fulfillment of the basic psychological needs is supported as they engage in the relevant behaviors. SDT proposes that people will tend naturally to internalize the values and regulations of their social groups. This tendency is facilitated by feelings of relatedness to socializing others, as well as feelings of competence with respect to the regulation being internalized. The latter includes the ability to understand or grasp the meaning or rationale behind the regulation and an ability to enact it. Supports for relatedness and competence thus facilitate internalization and can be sufficient to produce introjected values or compartmentalized (poorly integrated) identifications. However, for a regulation to become more integral to one’s self, supports for autonomy are also required. That is, although support for relatedness and competence needs may promote the internalization of a regulation or value, those supports alone will not be sufficient to foster integration. For integration to occur there must be an opportunity for the individual to freely process and endorse transmitted values and regulations (and to modify or transform them when necessary). Excessive external pressures, controls, and evaluations appear to forestall rather than facilitate this active, constructive process of giving personal meaning and valence to acquired regulations. Field research and laboratory experiments provided support for our general hypothesis. For example, Grolnick and Ryan (1989) interviewed parents of late-elementary students in their homes and then assessed the children’s motivation and internalization in their classrooms. This study revealed that the degree to which parents provided autonomy support, optimal structure, and interpersonal involvement concerning their children’s school work directly affected the extent to which the children valued and internalized the regulation of school-related activities. Parents who were rated by the interviewers as more involved and autonomy supportive had children who displayed not only more intrinsic motivation but also more internalized self-regulation for academic endeavors. In turn this was associated with enhanced performance and well-being. Subsequently, Grolnick, Ryan, and Deci (1991) showed that children’s perceptions of parental involvement and autonomy support also predicted more autonomous self-regulation. Williams and Deci (1996) provided data showing the generalizability of this model of internalization to medical school settings....

    [...]

  • ...It remains extrinsic motivation because, even though fully volitional, it is instrumental rather than being what Csikszentmihalyi (1975) referred to as autotelic....

    [...]

  • ...For example, Chandler and Connell (1987) showed that, increasingly with age, children displayed internalized regulation of behaviors that were originally externally compelled. Yet internalization, like other natural processes such as intrinsic motivation, requires nutriments to function effectively; in other words, internalization does not happen automatically. The degree to which people are able to actively synthesize cultural demands, values, and regulations and to incorporate them into the self is in large part a function of the degree to which fulfillment of the basic psychological needs is supported as they engage in the relevant behaviors. SDT proposes that people will tend naturally to internalize the values and regulations of their social groups. This tendency is facilitated by feelings of relatedness to socializing others, as well as feelings of competence with respect to the regulation being internalized. The latter includes the ability to understand or grasp the meaning or rationale behind the regulation and an ability to enact it. Supports for relatedness and competence thus facilitate internalization and can be sufficient to produce introjected values or compartmentalized (poorly integrated) identifications. However, for a regulation to become more integral to one’s self, supports for autonomy are also required. That is, although support for relatedness and competence needs may promote the internalization of a regulation or value, those supports alone will not be sufficient to foster integration. For integration to occur there must be an opportunity for the individual to freely process and endorse transmitted values and regulations (and to modify or transform them when necessary). Excessive external pressures, controls, and evaluations appear to forestall rather than facilitate this active, constructive process of giving personal meaning and valence to acquired regulations. Field research and laboratory experiments provided support for our general hypothesis. For example, Grolnick and Ryan (1989) interviewed parents of late-elementary students in their homes and then assessed the children’s motivation and internalization in their classrooms....

    [...]

  • ...For example, Chandler and Connell (1987) showed that, increasingly with age, children displayed internalized regulation of behaviors that were originally externally compelled....

    [...]