Psychologists have long been working to answer the research question of how humans adapt to different situational and relational demands across different life domains as learning results over time. The source for such changes, a self-regulative mechanism, refers to human motivation and serves as the psychological process that enables humans to interact meaningfully with their environment (
Bandura 1991,
2001). Motivation is an essential psychological process that elicits, controls, and sustains behavior (
Pinder 2008). Self-determination theory (“SDT”;
Deci and Ryan 1985a,
2000;
Ryan and Deci 2017), a needs-based motivation theory, offers a multidimensional framework of motivation that incorporates both levels (quantity) and dimensions (quality) of motivation (
Deci and Ryan 2000;
Ryan and Deci 2017). It proposes that the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs—autonomy, relatedness, and competence—promotes highly self-determined motivation and adaptive results at work (
Gagné and Deci 2005;
Baard et al. 2004). In addition, the hierarchical model of self-determined motivation (“H-SDT”;
Vallerand 1997;
Vallerand and Ratelle 2002) suggests that self-determined motivation can act at three reciprocally related conceptual levels: the global, the contextual, and the situational. Furthermore, the H-SDT model also suggests that determinants and consequences of intrinsic/extrinsic motivation may occur at all three levels of generality and that the changes among different levels are recursive (
Vallerand 1997). H-SDT supplements previous research and allows researchers to study the temporal change patterns in motivation (
Shipp and Cole 2015) and motivational consequences from multidimensional and multi-level perspectives.
SDT (
Deci and Ryan 2000;
Gagné and Deci 2005) emphasizes the importance of organismic experiences in humans seeking to satisfy their basic psychological needs while avoiding those that may thwart them. SDT researchers have established research evidence for the cross-cultural validity of the need for autonomy (
Chirkov et al. 2003;
DeCharms 1968), relatedness (
Baumeister and Leary 1995), and competence (
Csikszentmihalyi 1988). At the same time, needs-support-seeking behavior (e.g., seeking feedback or recognition, forming meaningful connections, proactive problem solving, and so on) facilitates internalization, a process of motivational changes in self-regulation that is shown over time (
Deci and Ryan 2000;
Gagné and Deci 2005). Past organizational research implied that satisfying the three basic psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence resulted in improved subjective well-being (e.g.,
Boezeman and Ellemers 2009;
Milyavskaya and Koestner 2011). On the other hand, needs frustration—something that has been less researched—resulting from thwarting situations (e.g., deprivation of work resources, abusive supervision, minimum volition at work) are demotivating and negatively affect employees’ psychological/physical health. Hence, the parallel process (less self-determined regulation) of motivational change—externalization—results from repeated needs frustration over time (
Deci and Ryan 2008b;
Gagné and Deci 2005).
Theoretical Framework and Research Hypotheses
Autonomy in the workplace, described as a perception of free will to carry out job-related activities, such as being able to control the specifics of work attempt and its desired outcome (
Ryan and Deci 2001), captures the universal spirit of many management “best practices” in organizations, including empowerment, total quality management, autonomous workgroups, and flexible job/work design (
Gagné and Bhave 2011). Research suggests high work autonomy predicts job satisfaction, commitment, and performance (
Spector 1986). Satisfaction with the basic psychological need for autonomy has also been found to relate to many well-being implications, such as higher work engagement (
Baard et al. 2004), less stress and work-family conflict (
Thompson and Prottas 2006), and lower burnout (
Taris et al. 2002). In addition, the satisfaction of the basic psychological needs for relatedness and competence has also been correlated to one’s daily well-being (
Reis et al. 2000).
Drawing on the SDT (
Deci and Ryan 2000;
Ryan and Deci 2017) and a multidimensional conceptualization of psychological health, including employee well-being and ill-being at the same time, this research examines changes in basic needs satisfaction/frustration related to subjective well-being/ill-being via changes in motivation while accounting for the motivational trait, the general causality orientation. The contributions of this research were that it allowed the mapping out of the variations (i.e., changes) of perceived psychological needs satisfaction/frustration as motivational antecedents to be studied, together with the changes in the types of motivation at work and their multidimensional health-related consequences to advance our theoretical understanding of the collective temporal patterns outside of the lab with no experiment manipulations. Furthermore, this study (see
Figure 1 for integrated research model) uses a longitudinal field research design to understand the within-person dynamics of needs satisfaction/frustration, work motivation, and employees’ psychological health naturally occurring in the workplace.
Psychological health is a multidimensional concept (
Ryan and Deci 2017). Under the SDT framework, it is one’s dynamic reflection on both manifestations of wellness and the absence of illness, such as depletion and exhaustion of biological and psychological energy (
Martela and Sheldon 2019). At the same time,
Deci and Ryan (
2008b) also emphasized the importance of including the representation of the fullness and vitality of the organismic function of human beings on top of the subjective experience of positive versus negative affect in the definition of well-being. In other words, a psychologically healthy worker shows awareness, cognitive flexibility, engagement, and integration rather than depletion, defensiveness, rigidity, or segregation (
Ryan and Deci 2017). Longitudinal research (
Vansteenkiste et al. 2020) also showed that severe and chronic stresses caused by the interplay of physiological and psychological needs thwarting work activities could be detrimental and dysfunctional to one’s function at work and long-term career.
Recent research investigating perceived needs supportive and thwarting actions from significant people (e.g., life partners, coaches, teachers, supervisors) implied that needs satisfaction/frustration leads to well-being/ill-being independently (
Deci and Ryan 2008b). The reason to separate needs frustration from needs satisfaction is that it involves active thwarting of basic psychological needs rather than simply the absence of satisfaction of basic psychological needs (
Vansteenkiste et al. 2020). While patterns have shown that people’s well-being levels decrease with lower levels of needs satisfaction, independent ill-being aspects suggest a separate asymmetrical path (
Chen et al. 2015). Similar to active disturbance, specific actions/interactions thwart psychological needs captured by people’s ill-being in different contexts (
Vansteenkiste and Ryan 2013). Empirical evidence also suggests that if basic psychological needs are thwarted, personal goal-striving behavior and affect regulation may have even more severe adverse health outcomes than when such needs are not satisfied (
Bartholomew et al. 2011;
Deci and Ryan 2008a). Although few studies have examined these distinct paths,
Gillet et al. (
2012) found that perceived organizational and personal support impacted employees’ well-being and ill-being through their perceived satisfaction and frustration of basic psychological needs resulting from work tasks via two distinct paths. However, these effects have not been examined for changes over time. Adopting a dynamic perspective with which to view the two separated paths traveling parallel, we expect that, over time, changes in basic needs satisfaction and frustration will lead to corresponding changes in employee well-being and ill-being independently. This theoretical expectation leads us to make the following hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1. Changes in employee well-being will be positively predicted by the within-person changes in satisfaction of the basic psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence over time.
Hypothesis 2. Changes in employee ill-being will be positively predicted by the within-person changes in frustration of the basic psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence over time.
SDT (
Deci and Ryan 1985a,
2000) framework suggests that either controlled (e.g., to obtain monetary compensation or to avoid punishment) or autonomous reasons (e.g., to have fun or to realize one’s values) may drive people’s thoughts and actions. Autonomous motivation includes two forms of self-determined motivation: intrinsic and identified regulation, while controlled motivation includes external regulation and introjected regulation (
Deci and Ryan 2000;
Gagné and Deci 2005). According to SDT, self-determined regulation (e.g., autonomous motivation) stems from repeated needs satisfaction experiences, which is essential for people to internalize organizational values and self-concord goals over time (
Gagné and Deci 2005). Domain-specific research echoes such a statement, as autonomy, relatedness, and competence needs satisfaction is related to a higher level of autonomous motivation in various settings, for example, in sports (
Standage et al. 2006), in the workplace (
Baard et al. 2004), and in education (
Standage et al. 2006).
Recently,
Bidee et al. (
2016) tested a similar dual-path model using a dynamic approach and experience sampling methodology that included changes in needs satisfaction/frustration and autonomous/controlled motivation over a few days. They found that the growth curves for controlled and autonomous work motivation were the opposite. Surprisingly, their study found no significant positive linear relationships between the change in needs satisfaction/frustration and autonomous/controlled work motivation. Only the initial level of needs satisfaction was positively related to the change in autonomous work motivation. These findings from the study—one of the rare ones that used a longitudinal research design to examine these paths—were not consistent with past empirical findings from cross-sectional studies, suggesting a need for replicating and further research on the dynamic nature of work motivation. In addition, SDT scholars were calling for accumulative empirical evidence on the dynamics of motivation for theoretical advancement (
Ryan and Deci 2017). The present study attempted to replicate and extend this line of research on the dynamic nature of motivational change and tried to further test such a temporal relationship with a longer timespan between different measurements (e.g., four months in this study compared to about a week in
Bidee et al. 2016) in the for-profit businesses (e.g., compared to the volunteers studied in the
Bidee et al. 2016). In this vein, we propose the following hypotheses:
Hypothesis 3. Changes in autonomous motivation will be predicted by the initial level and within-person changes in satisfaction of the basic psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence over time.
Hypothesis 4. Changes in controlled motivation will be predicted by the initial level and within-person changes in frustration of the basic psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence over time.
According to SDT, the satisfaction/frustration of basic psychological needs is the gateway to work motivation and its psychological and behavioral consequences (
Ryan and Deci 2017). Furthermore, these psychological mechanisms could form the behavior-regulatory processes of internalization and externalization over time (
Gagné and Deci 2005;
Bidee et al. 2016). For instance, the satisfaction of the three basic psychological needs has been found to mediate the relationship between perceived supervisor autonomy support and job satisfaction (
Adie et al. 2008;
Deci et al. 2001). These studies were conducted using mainly cross-sectional research designs and between-person measurements of work motivation.
Nonetheless, a few longitudinal studies using athlete samples support these process-oriented dynamic motivational relationships. For instance, positive relationships have been found among coach autonomy support, needs satisfaction, and athletes’ well-being (e.g.,
Gagné 2003), and similar results were obtained through multi-level empirical investigations (within- vs. between-person) in sports (
Reinboth and Duda 2006;
Adie et al. 2012). Needs support from coaches also resulted in higher perceived needs satisfaction, leading to higher autonomous motivation and ultimately predicted end-of-season performance (
Smith et al. 2007). Extending this line of research, we proposed that such motivational change processes should occur in the workplace over several months, with changes in needs satisfaction and frustration leading to changes in well-being and ill-being via the changes in autonomous and controlled motivation (e.g., autonomous vs. controlled self-regulatory patterns in the workplace context), respectively.
Hypothesis 5. Changes in employee well-being are positively predicted by the changes in satisfaction of the three basic psychological needs via the indirect path of changes in autonomous motivation over time.
Hypothesis 6. Changes in employee ill-being are positively predicted by the changes in frustration of the three basic psychological needs via the indirect path of changes in controlled motivation over time.
General causality orientations (“GCOs”) describe the “trait-like adaptations” (
McAdams and Pals 2006) that unfold people’s propensities to orient themselves toward different and varied motivation conditioning situations (
Ryan and Deci 2017). There are three types of GCOs: (1) autonomous orientation, in which people approach their environment by treating it as the source of relevant information since they take an interest in both external events and the accompanying inner experiences; (2) controlled orientation, in which people’s attention and concerns tend to be oriented only toward external contingencies and controls; and (3) impersonal orientation, which is the degree to which people focus primarily on the obstacles to their goals when they react to their lack of control over outcomes—and this could easily lead to amotivation (
Ryan and Deci 2017). Beyond being indicators of the different forms of contextual motivation that one could demonstrate in different life domains, GCOs are trait-level (global-level) constructs focusing on capturing individuals’ characteristic differences (
Deci and Ryan 1985b). Such individual differences are the persistent results of situational support vs. deprivation that one can experience through long-term learning (
Ryan and Deci 2017).
Past empirical evidence supports that higher self-esteem and self-actualization are promoted by higher levels of autonomous causality orientation (
Deci and Ryan 1985a). For example, higher individual autonomous causality orientations resulted in higher autonomous motivation to lose weight and better weight loss results from maintenance over time (
Williams et al. 1996).
Kwan et al. (
2011) also showed that positive affect was positively predicted more by autonomous causality orientation than impersonal causality orientation during self-selected exercises in a longitudinal study. In addition, college students with a stronger controlled causality orientation tended to set performance-oriented goals (e.g., similar to controlled self-regulation) and experienced more anxiety when they received failure feedback (
Koestner and Zuckerman 1994).
Lonky and Reihman (
1990) also found that higher controlled causality orientation predicted students’ cheating behavior when opportunities were provided. In the present research, we also examined whether controlled causality orientation induces people toward more venerable contextual needs-thwarting factors and, at the same time, whether it results in higher levels of ill-being such as psychological and physical exhaustion as part of the dual-path model.
Under the SDT, employees with higher trait-level autonomous causality orientation will be more ready to pick up situational and relational cues that support basic psychological needs, resulting in more autonomous self-regulation and a higher level of well-being (
Gagné and Deci 2005).
Guay et al. (
2003) showed that global (trait) level causality orientations predicted changes in learning motivation (in the educational domain) over time. Our study aimed to replicate and extend the understanding of the dynamic nature of motivation with possible cross-level change mechanisms in the work domain. Furthermore, we wanted to see whether GCOs trigger changes in employees’ work motivation via their perception of needs satisfaction or frustration—in other words, how the GCOs, employees’ trait motivation, resulted from one’s long-term learning experience, predict the within-person changes in well/ill-being via the changes in autonomous/controlled self-regulation. However, since the present study is one of the pioneer studies to engage in an explanatory longitudinal investigation of the temporal relationship between GCOs and the dynamics in employees’ work motivation and well/ill-being over time, it lacks a known basis to hypothesize the speed (e.g., acceleration or deceleration) of such changes. Thus, we anticipated stable, linear temporal relationships among GCOs, changes in work motivation, and changes in employees’ well/ill-being in the spirit of preliminary empirical exploration in this study.
Hypothesis 7. A linear increase (e.g., even positive changes) in the employees’ autonomous work motivation is positively predicted by autonomous GCO over time.
Hypothesis 8. A linear increase in employees ‘controlled work motivation is positively predicted by the controlled GCO over time.
Hypothesis 9. A linear increase in employees’ well-being is positively predicted by the autonomous GCO over time.
Hypothesis 10. A linear increase in employees’ ill-being is positively predicted by the controlled GCO over time.