Intrinsic Motivation: when interest moves you, not the reward

Intrinsic motivation moves you through interest and meaning in the task itself, more than through any external reward it might bring.

When something genuinely matters to you, you keep going even when no one is valuing the effort in that moment.

The three needs Self-Determination Theory describes

Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan presented Self-Determination Theory in 1985, a theory that explains exactly this difference and that over the years proposed that intrinsic motivation is fostered when three basic psychological needs are met:

• autonomy (feeling that you decide how to do things),
• competence (noticing that you’re progressing and mastering the task),
• relatedness (feeling connected to the people you work for or with).

When those three pieces are in place, the work sustains itself, without needing a constant outside push.

How this profile shows up

• Effort holds up even when no one is watching: it doesn’t depend on a present boss or an imminent review.
• Curiosity about improving shows up spontaneously, without anyone having to ask for it.
• Tasks with no perceived meaning are harder to tolerate, however well paid they are.
• Outside recognition is appreciated, but it isn’t what sustains the day-to-day effort.

When the context stops sustaining the interest

This profile’s blind spot is assuming genuine interest is always enough: in environments where the task loses meaning (very rigid processes, little real autonomy), intrinsic motivation can drop sharply, and it can be hard to recognize in time that the problem isn’t you but the context.

The three conditions (autonomy, progress, meaning) work as a reference for reading that wear: when one of them is missing for a sustained period, the explanation usually lies in the context before it lies in the person.

What the data say about work and basic needs

The theory hasn’t stayed in the lab. Van den Broeck, Ferris, Chang and Rosen (2016) used meta-analytic techniques to review 99 studies, with 119 samples, on the satisfaction of the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness at work: what fosters it and what it’s related to. Their review tested whether each need contributes something of its own, and pointed to studying not only the satisfaction but also the frustration of those needs as work still to be done.

The other big finding comes from Cerasoli, Nicklin and Ford (2014), who brought together 40 years of research in school, work and sports (183 samples, more than 212,000 people). Intrinsic motivation was a moderate to strong predictor of performance (corrected correlations between 0.21 and 0.45) and kept its weight even when incentives were in play. With one nuance: it mattered less when the incentive was directly tied to performance, and more when it was tied indirectly.

For this profile, the implication is twofold: it performs better in environments that genuinely offer autonomy, progress and meaning, and it feels their absence more than other profiles do, no matter how well paid or recognized the work is on the outside.

The puzzle experiment: how it was discovered

The very idea of intrinsic motivation as something measurable, and not just sensed, goes back to an experiment by Edward Deci published in 1971.

A group of college students solved Soma puzzles over three sessions. Some were paid for each solution in the second session; the others never were. In the third, with no pay for anyone, Deci left the room on a pretext and measured how much free time each participant kept spending on the puzzles.

Those who had never been paid kept playing longer than those who had. Two years later, Lepper, Greene and Nisbett (1973) found the same pattern with children who liked to draw and named it the overjustification effect: introducing an expected reward for something already enjoyed can later reduce interest in it, even once the reward is gone.

That work laid the foundations of what Deci and Ryan would formalize as Self-Determination Theory, and it explains why this profile performs worse, not better, when someone tries to reinforce a task it already found interesting with added incentives.

If your main engine is goals, recognition or clear incentives, check out the extrinsic motivation profile.

You can go back to your full result in the What Motivates Me at Work? test.

Sources

• Cerasoli, C. P., Nicklin, J. M. & Ford, M. T. (2014). Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives jointly predict performance: A 40-year meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 140(4), 980-1008. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035661
• Deci, E. L. (1971). Effects of externally mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 18(1), 105-115.
• Deci, E. L. & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. Plenum.
• Lepper, M. R., Greene, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1973). Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the “overjustification” hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28(1), 129-137.
• Van den Broeck, A., Ferris, D. L., Chang, C.-H. & Rosen, C. C. (2016). A review of self-determination theory’s basic psychological needs at work. Journal of Management, 42(5), 1195-1229. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206316632058