The First Psychological Need: Autonomy

Researchers have studied our need for autonomy and the effects of not having it more than any other psychological need.

Autonomy is our human need to perceive we have choices. It is our need to feel that what we are doing is of our own volition. It is our perception that we are the source of our actions.

A good example of autonomy is what happens when you feed a baby. What does the baby do as you bring a spoonful of baby food to his mouth? He grabs for the spoon—he wants to do it himself. He wants to be the source of that food going into his mouth. Despite not having the skill to feed himself, he has a need to control the situation. If he is restrained by a high chair, he will shut his mouth or turn his head. This explains the orange smear of mashed carrots across the faces of babies in most mealtime photos.

If you are of a certain age, you will remember the animated Maypo cereal commercials. If not, search the Internet and watch these classics on YouTube. In one of my favorites, a father is trying to get his child to eat the maple-flavored oat cereal. The kid will have nothing of it. The father plays games with the spoon, hoping to entice his child to eat his Maypo, but as soon as the spoon comes near the kid's mouth, he clamps his mouth shut. Finally, the father appeals to the little boy's love of cowboys and pretends to be a cowboy taking a bite of the cereal. After one bite, the father realizes he loves the cereal and starts chowing it down himself. The kid sees his dad enjoying and eating all his cereal and cries out, “I want my Maypo!” Any parent who has engaged in reverse psychology is appealing to a child's need for autonomy. (Beware, however, that those tactics are likely to backfire. Children can detect manipulation a mile away. If they feel you are manipulating them, their second psychological need, relatedness, is undermined.)

Diverse studies over the past twenty years indicate that adults never lose their psychological need for autonomy. For example, productivity increases significantly for blue-collar workers in manufacturing plants when they are given the ability to stop the line. So does the productivity of white-collar workers in major investment banking firms who report a high sense of autonomy. Employees experience autonomy when they feel some control and choice about the work they do. Autonomy doesn't mean that managers are permissive or hands-off but rather that employees feel they have influence in the workplace. Empowerment may often be considered a cliché, but if people don't have a sense of empowerment, their sense of autonomy suffers and so do their productivity and performance.

It is a challenge for some people to grasp that everything they do is their own choice. Whether they are formally empowered or not, people can choose their own level of autonomy.

One of the most powerful examples of choosing autonomy is the description by psychologist Dr. Viktor Frankl of how he and others managed to survive in some of the worst conditions one can imagine—a World War II concentration camp. Frankl obviously had no freedoms accorded to him, yet he found ways to satisfy his basic need for autonomy by appreciating a beautiful sunrise, helping others who were suffering more than he was, and taking responsibility for his own frame of mind. Of that experience, he wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

A workplace axiom says that autonomy is 20 percent given and 80 percent taken, so it is hard to make the case that we have the freedom to do what we want at work. However, the truth is, we have a choice to get out of bed, go to work, and make a contribution—or not. Anytime we take the position of not having a choice, we are undermining our experience of autonomy.

“If You Want to Motivate Someone, Shut Up Already”—I was curious about an article with this provocative title. To find out more, I called Brandon Irwin, the lead researcher cited in the article, which highlighted motivational practices that don't work the way we thought. Brandon explained that initially his team was surprised to learn that when a sports or training coach is vocal, verbally encouraging a trainee—“do one more; come on, you can do it; keep up the energy”—performance is significantly lower than the results achieved with a quiet but attentive coach.

Brandon hypothesizes that in light of what we know about autonomy, quiet coaches get better results than verbal coaches do because the verbal encouragement externalizes the exercisers' attention and energy. The shift from internal to external blocks the exercisers' sense of autonomy. The external encouragement and praising subverted the coaching subjects' own internal desire to perform, push, and excel—and thus limited their capacity to do so.

In an attempt to offset the distraction of the verbally encouraging coach, Brandon and his team tried incentives. If exercisers achieved a challenging goal (in spite of the verbal coaching), they would receive a prize such as a free gym membership. Consistent with studies showing how rewards tend to diminish performance in the short and long term, the added distraction of an external incentive—more motivational junk food—further blocked the exercisers' perception of autonomy, impaired their ability to tap into their own internal resources, and lowered performance even more.

Brandon's results on vocal sports coaches also have interesting implications for the second psychological need—relatedness.