Resurser och blogg är till för dig som vill ha mer kunskap inom det arbetspsykologiska fältet, som exempelvis ledarskap, medarbetarskap och organisation. Vi tipsar om böcker och filmklipp där du både kan få inspiration och möjlighet att stilla din kunskapstörst. I vår blogg hittar du bland annat artiklar om ledarskap, intervjuer av de främsta forskarna i området samt våra egna reflektioner i ämnet.

Vad är motivation - Del 3

Följ bloggkonversation mellan Stefan Söderfjell och Edward Deci. Edward tillhör ledarskapscentrums expertnätverk och han är idag professor i samhällsvetenskap och professor i psykologi vid University of Rochester. I mer än 40 år har han varit engagerad och ledande forskare inom mänsklig motivation. Mycket av detta arbete, som har utförts i samarbete med Richard M Ryan, har lett till teoribildningen Self Determination Theory och har publicerats i ansedda vetenskapliga journals inom det psykologiska arbetsfältet såsom Psychological Bulletin, American Psychologist samt personality and social psychology.

Edvard har publicerat tio böcker, däribland: Intrinsic Motivation (Plenum, 1975), The Psychology of Self-Determination (DC Heath, 1980); Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (tillsammans med RM Ryan, Plenum, 1985) , Why We Do What We Do (Putnam, 1995; Viking / Penguin, 1996), och Handbook of Self-Determination Research (co-edited med RM Ryan, University of Rochester Press, 2002).

Stefan Söderfjell ställer frågorna och Edvard Deci svarar utifrån sin forskning och sina erfarenheter efter mer än 40 års studier av mänsklig motivation. Detta är den tredje frågan och svaret i intervjun. Har du inte läst de första två inläggen så rekommenderas att du börjar med det innan du läser vidare. Du finner det första inlägget här och det andra inlägget här.

Stefan Söderfjell:

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 authentic as there were 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 e-mail were even more internalized than was the case in the above example, it would be integrated such that replying to your e-mail 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 e-mail, 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?

Edward Deci:

First, let me say 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 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 questions 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.

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 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.To be continued...