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Research has shown that autonomy support is a powerful predictor of employee well-being in the West. Despite this importance in the West, the role of autonomy in relation to employee well-being remains relatively understudied in other contexts, such as Malaysia. This is presumably so due to the assumption that employees in a country of excessive hierarchy, like Malaysia, do not value autonomy. Drawing on self-determination theory (SDT), this paper aims to investigate the relationship between employee perceived autonomy support and well-being in the context of Malaysia.

The authors propose that employee-perceived autonomy support is positively related to employee well-being (measured as work engagement and emotional exhaustion) mediated by basic psychological need satisfaction. The authors also hypothesize that the positive relationship is even stronger when employees are less autonomy-oriented. The authors tested this moderated mediation model using a survey of 125 interns in Malaysia.

The results provide strong evidence for the mediating role of need satisfaction when intern well-being is measured as work engagement, while the evidence is less conclusive when employee well-being is measured as emotional exhaustion. Moreover, the moderating effect of autonomy orientation is insignificant.

This paper enhances understanding of the cross-culture applicability of SDT and thereby provided a nuanced understanding of the boundary conditions of autonomy support.

Our ongoing program of research works with teachers to help them become more autonomy supportive during instruction and hence more able to promote students’ classroom motivation and engagement.

We have published five experimentally based, longitudinally designed, teacher-focused intervention studies that have tested the effectiveness and educational benefits of an autonomy-supportive intervention program (ASIP).

Findings show that (1) teachers can learn how to become more autonomy supportive and less controlling toward students, (2) students of the teachers who participate in ASIP report greater psychological need satisfaction and lesser need frustration, (3) these same students report and behaviorally display a wide range of important educational benefits, such as greater classroom engagement, (4) teachers benefit as much from giving autonomy support as their students do from receiving it as teachers show large postintervention gains in outcomes such as teaching efficacy and job satisfaction, and (5) these ASIP-induced benefits are long lasting as teachers use the ASIP experience as a professional developmental opportunity to upgrade the quality of their motivating style.

Our ASIP helps teachers learn how to better support their students’ autonomy during instruction. The value of this teaching skill can be seen in teachers’ and students’ enhanced classroom experience and functioning.

Cognitive evaluation theory (CET; Deci, 1975), SDT's first mini-theory, was built from research on the dynamic interplay between external events (e.g., rewards, choice) and people's task interest or enjoyment – that is, intrinsic motivation (IM). At the time, this research was quite controversial, as operant theory (Skinner, 1971) had dominated the psychological landscape. The central assumption of operant theory was that reinforcement contingencies in the environment control behavior, which precluded the existence of inherently satisfying activities performed for non-separable outcomes. During this time, Deci proposed that people – by nature – possess intrinsic motivation (IM), which can manifest as engagement in curiosity-based behaviors, discovery of new perspectives, and seeking out optimal challenges (see also Harlow, 1953; White, 1959). IM thus represents a manifestation of the organismic growth tendency and is readily observed in infants' and toddlers' exploratory behavior and play. Operationally, an intrinsically motivated activity is performed for its own sake – that is, the behavior is experienced as inherently satisfying. From an attributional perspective (deCharms, 1968), such behaviors have an internal perceived locus of causality, as people perceive their behavior as emanating from their sense of self, rather than from experiences of control or coercion.

The cross-cultural significance of autonomy within self-determination theory is divisive on universal significance. This paper aims to report a sequential exploratory mixed methods study conducted to construct and validate a scale to investigate how, in Malaysian context, the construct of autonomy is conceptualized in comparison with the existing scale owing to cultural variation.

Focus group interviews identified dimensions of autonomy support that were specific to Malaysian culture and guided the development of the survey and construct validation was done using structure equation modeling.

The results show that the proposed scale has satisfactory psychometric properties, and the hypothesized model had a good fit to the data. The new scale produced four dimensions of teacher autonomy support, namely, responsible, approachable, shows respect and conveys confidence, with three items in each dimension. Malaysian secondary school students’ perception of autonomy support was found to be distinctive from the traditional measure.

Implications for teachers are discussed for culturally meaningful interpretation of the autonomy construct for classroom teaching practices.

The benefits of teacher autonomy support for optimal school functioning is evident in literature. However, studies are meager about teachers applying the concept of autonomy support in real settings (regular classroom).

Based on empirical data within self-determination theory, a longitudinal intervention program was designed to facilitate autonomy support instruction in a natural classroom setting and to assess its effectiveness on Thai students’ learning motivation. In a quasi-experimental, nonequivalent control group design, with an appended withdrawal design, 103 students from Grade 6 of a Thai public school underwent the intervention for seven weeks in natural classroom settings. The students in both the groups self-reported their class-related experience before intervention (pretest), after intervention (posttest1) and after the withdrawal of intervention (posttest2).

MANOVA results revealed a significant mean difference for all dependent measures on posttest1 between the experimental group and control group. Also, after the withdrawal of treatment, the experimental group showed a significant omnibus effect on combination of dependent measures, while scores of control group were stable.

The findings have implications for elementary school teachers in Thailand to adapt and adopt autonomy supportive instruction as a classroom practice.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between transformational leadership (TL), autonomy support management behaviors and employees’ psychological health.

A total of 512 Canadian workers assessed their immediate supervisor’s level of TL and autonomy support management behaviors. Participants also assessed their own psychological health through measures of psychological well-being and burnout at work.

Results from structural equation modeling indicate that TL is related to employee psychological well-being and burnout. This effect is fully mediated by more specific autonomy support and psychological control management behaviors. These results suggest that autonomy support and psychological control management behaviors may have a more proximal effect on employees’ psychological health than TL does. Also, managers’ leadership and behaviors appear to better predict employees’ psychological well-being at work than employee burnout.

Managers with a TL style employ more autonomy support and fewer psychological control behaviors, which makes employees happier and less burned out. Based on these results, leadership training programs would gain to focus on the development of more specific management behaviors among leaders, such as autonomy support, to enhance employees’ psychological health, especially their well-being.

This research expands understanding of the relationship between TL and the psychological health of employees by shedding light on the mediating role of autonomy support management behaviors in this relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the level and predictors of work engagement among service sector employees in eight European countries.

The work seeks to discover if job demands and resources, i.e. job autonomy and social support, affect work engagement in differing ways in different countries when socio‐demographical variables and work‐related factors are controlled. The study is based on a statistical analysis of survey data from Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and the UK in 2007 (n=7,867). The data represent four economic sectors: retail trade, finance and banking, telecoms and public hospitals.

The results show that the level of work engagement varies not only between countries but also between those four economic sectors within each country. Additionally, the findings indicate that demands decrease work engagement, while autonomy and support increase it. Although the effects are mainly the same across the countries, the article also points out some exceptions in this regard.

Although the paper is built upon established theories about job demands and autonomy, it uses a newer work engagement approach, produces cross‐national knowledge about work engagement and its predictors. Cross‐national approaches to work engagement are still rare.

The purpose of this study is to investigate conditions that facilitate shop-floor operators to fulfil their needs to carry out job roles and whether the need fulfilment affects their job performance in lean-implemented textile and apparel firms in Sri Lanka.

The data were collected from 922 shop-floor employees and their immediate supervisors. Statistical methods were used for the data analysis.

The results of the analysis imply the importance of managerial autonomy support and need fulfilment for enhanced job performance; the duration of lean production in operation moderates job performance in such a way that the longer the duration, the higher will be job performance.

It could be expected that academics and practitioners alike are motivated by a desire to clearly apprehend work systems in lean-implemented textile and apparel firms.

Although a supportive workplace is increasingly considered important for employees' performance, much of the evidence remains speculative, for example, it lacks offsetting mechanisms. This study addresses circumstances when perceived support helps and when it hurts work performance, depending on the mediating effects of job autonomy, intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction under the boundary conditions of perceived helpfulness of social media platforms and felt stress.

This study collected data using a questionnaire protocol that was adapted and refined from the original scales in existing studies. The sample consists of 900 employees from the public healthcare industry in Vietnam. To test the hypotheses, the partial least squares (PLS) technique was used.

This study finds that job autonomy, intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction are important for the perceived support and work performance relationship in which perceived helpfulness of social media platforms plays a critical confounding role. The findings also confirm that felt stress negatively moderates the relationship between job satisfaction and work performance, weakening the effect job satisfaction has on employee work performance.

This study specifies the boundary conditions under which work performance is mostly affected while enhancing the understanding of how to reinforce intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction. The findings offer organizational and human resource management (HRM) scholars and practitioners a closer look at perceived helpfulness of social media platforms and support the suggestions that autonomy-supportive workplaces are superior.

Based on self-determination theory (SDT), the present study aims to assess the effect of managerial (manager trust and support), work (job autonomy) and individual (intrinsic motivation) characteristics on job performance of telecommuters in a pre- and post-coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak period and is further studied longitudinally after six months of continued mandatory telecommuting.

Data were collected from information technology (IT) sector employees in three phases and model fitness, reliability and validity of the data for all three phases were assessed through CFA models, while the hypotheses were tested through path analysis.

Perceived manager trust and support increases job performance and the effect strengthens with an increase in telecommuting extent. Job autonomy had similar effects with the exception that employees did not enjoy autonomy when mandatory telecommuting arrangement was initially introduced. Lastly, intrinsic motivation fades away as employees continue to work permanently from their homes.

Permanent full-time telecommuting is expected to continue for the unforeseeable future; the present study suggests that while ensuring increased trust, support and job autonomy to employees, managers must also ensure that employees do not feel professionally isolated and attempt to keep individuals intrinsically motivated.

The authors assess the effect of managerial (manager trust and support), work (job autonomy) and individual (intrinsic motivation) characteristics on job performance under three different types of telecommuting arrangements (voluntary part-time, mandatory full-time and continued mandatory full-time) by collecting data in three different time frames from the same individuals.