Leadership and People Management: Foundations to Practice · Motivation and Engagement
Self-Determination Theory: Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness
A motivational framework built over four decades by researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan identifies three basic psychological needs that determine whether motivation is genuine and durable or fragile and externally dependent.
Self-Determination Theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan beginning in the late 1970s and formalized in their 1985 book, proposes that humans have three innate psychological needs, autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and that the quality of motivation, performance, and wellbeing all rise and fall with how well these three needs are actually met in a given environment [9].
Key Takeaways
- Self-Determination Theory, developed by Deci and Ryan, identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as three basic psychological needs underlying motivation and wellbeing.
- Autonomy means experiencing genuine volition and alignment with your own values, not independence; even following an instruction can feel autonomous if genuinely understood and agreed with.
- Competence is built through ongoing informational feedback and appropriately challenging work; relatedness is undermined by competition, cliques, and excessive criticism.
- The three needs are independent and cannot substitute for one another; a leader must diagnose which specific need is unmet rather than applying a generic fix.