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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.

Professionalization is an important issue in many all-volunteer nonprofit organizations (e.g. recreational sports clubs). Therefore, this study relied on the competing values framework and self-determination theory to investigate whether a newly developed intervention can effectively strengthen the management processes and leadership styles in all-volunteer sports clubs.

For this purpose, a rigorous non-equivalent pre-test post-test control group design was used. The intervention involved two sessions organized in sports clubs in which internal stakeholders (e.g. board members, coaches, volunteers) were invited to discuss change initiatives aimed at enhancing the organizational processes.

An effect on both the management processes and leadership styles was found. As for the management processes, the intervention had an impact on the internal processes, with especially the development of an internal communication plan and the annual assessment of the organization's operations being promoted by the intervention. Regarding the leadership styles, the intervention had an effect on the controlling and chaotic leadership style, with leaders becoming less chaotic and controlling in situations in which (respectively) the business plan was established and the tasks were distributed within the organization.

This intervention study adopted an innovative approach to organizational intervention research by focusing on the enhancement of both the management processes and the leadership styles. Its principles are also relevant and valuable to organizations operating in other organizational contexts.

Previous studies have demonstrated that an autonomy-supportive supervision style is associated with improved well-being and positive behaviours for supervisees. However, autonomy-supportive training (AST) has yet to be tailored to suit supervisors in low-skilled occupations for whom traditional pedagogical approaches may be inappropriate. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and preliminary evaluation of AST for these supervisors, using self-determination theory (SDT) and andragogical principles of adult learning.

SDT and andragogical principles were systematically integrated to develop (a 3 h) AST programme. The training sessions were trialled with 11 first-line supervisors in New Zealand as a preliminary evaluation of AST. The evaluation used open-ended questions following Kirkpatrick’s evaluation model and incorporated the trainer’s reflections.

Supervisors found AST relevant, easy to understand and suited to their approach to learning. Trainer’s reflections also provided insight into the challenges in conducting such training for supervisors in low-skilled occupations and the article makes suggestions to address these challenges.

AST can be successfully tailored to first-line supervisors, indicating that an autonomy-supportive style of leadership is relevant for those employed in low-skilled occupations. This initial evaluation provides a foundation for future studies to conduct higher-level assessment of AST.

AST can be utilised to provide first-line supervisors with access to improved leadership development opportunities. Challenges of conducting this kind of training programme in a context of low-skilled occupations are addressed and recommendations made for organisations and trainers.

This study is novel as it demonstrates the development of AST, a leadership skills training, tailored to suit the needs of an understudied group, supervisors in low-skilled occupations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating and moderating roles of perceived supervisor legitimacy in the association between perceived supervisor motivating styles and subordinate functioning. Specifically, based on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), two supervisory motivating styles were examined: the autonomy-supportive style, characterized by nurturing employees’ inner motivational resources, and the controlling style, in which supervisors pressure their employees to behave in specific manager-directed ways. Legitimacy was defined according to the Relational Model of Authority (RMA).

An online survey was administered to a sample of 252 employees. Moderation and mediation analyses were conducted to test the hypotheses.

The autonomy-supportive motivating style, but not the controlling style, was linked to employee work-related outcomes (i.e. job satisfaction, commitment, engagement, burnout, and depression) through perceived legitimacy. Legitimacy buffered the negative impact of the controlled orientation on burnout and depression.

Taken together, the results suggest that legitimacy as a resource may be enhanced by autonomy support and can also minimize the harmful consequences of controlling supervisory behaviors. The theoretical implications of integrating SDT with RMA and the practical implications of these findings are discussed.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

This research paper concentrates on designing a tailored training program to upskill supervisors from low-skilled occupations in positive leadership behaviors centered around an autonomy-supportive style. Group discussion and an exploration of example-led scenarios proved to be effective informal training tools for the 11 supervisor delegates, and the concurrent challenges of embedding a change in management approach included overcoming a general suspicion of training and a lack of familiarity with personal goal setting.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Given the complexity of societal, technological, and economic challenges encountered by schools and teachers, one may wonder whether and how teachers can still optimally motivate their students. To adopt a motivating role in today’s ever-changing, even stormy, educational landscape, teachers need more than a checklist of motivating practices. They also need a fundamental theoretical perspective that can serve as a general source of inspiration for their everyday classroom practices across various situations and in interaction with different students. Herein, we argue that self-determination theory represents such a valuable perspective. In Part I, we discuss the satisfaction of learners’ psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness as a source of student motivation, engagement, and resilience. We also present a recently developed circular model involving a broad variety of motivating (i.e., need-supportive) and demotivating (i.e., need-thwarting) teaching practices appealing to these three needs. In Part II, we discuss several implications of this circular model, thereby discussing the diverse pathways that lead to student need satisfaction, motivation, and engagement as well as highlighting teachers’ capacity for calibration to deal with uncertainty and change. We conclude that school principals and teachers do well to invest in both students’ and teachers’ psychological need experiences, such that they become skilled in flexibly adjusting themselves to diversity, uncertainty, and change.

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.

To assess the effect of diagnostic testing for coronary artery disease (CAD) on motivation for change, and on lifestyle change for patients with chest pain.

This observational study followed patients with chest pain suggestive of CAD for three years. Constructs of autonomous and controlled motivation for lifestyle change, autonomous orientation, and autonomy support from self‐determination theory were assessed. Self‐reported tobacco use, physical activity, and diet were assessed at baseline and three years later. Physician rating of pre‐ and post‐test probability of CAD were also assessed. CAD diagnosis was established after three years.

Physicians' autonomy‐supportive style and patients' autonomous orientations both predicted greater patient autonomous motivation, which in turn predicted improved diet, more exercise, and marginally less smoking. High probability of CAD also led patients to become more autonomously motivated for lifestyle change.

The observational nature of the study and the self‐report measures of health behaviors preclude causal conclusions from this study. Findings from this study suggest that patient motivation and risk behavior are affected by results of cardiac testing, by physicians' support of autonomy, and by patients' personalities.

Physicians may be effective in motivating behavior change around time of testing for CAD.

The self‐determination theory model for health behavior change accounted for change in patient health risk behavior change around the time of testing for CAD. Physicians and researchers might use these results to design and test interventions for practitioners to effectively motivate behavior change around the time of medical tests.

The teacher role in the classroom can explain important aspects of the student's school experience. The teacher-student relationship, a central dimension of social capital, influences students' engagement, and the teaching style plays an important role in student outcomes. But there is scarce literature that links teaching styles to teacher-student relationship. This article aims to (1) analyze whether there is a relationship between teaching styles and the type of relationship perceived by students; (2) test whether this relationship is equally strong for any teaching style; and (3) determine the extent to which students' perceptions vary according to their profile.

A structural equation model with four latent variables is estimated: two for the teacher-student relationship (emotional vs educational) and two for the teaching styles (directive vs participative), with information for 21,126 sixth-grade primary-students in 2019 in Spain.

Teacher-student relationships and teaching styles are interconnected. The participative style implies a better relationship. The perceptions of the teacher are heterogeneous, depending on gender (girls perceive clearer than boys) and with the educational background (children from lower educational background perceive both types of teaching styles more clearly).

The analysis is based on the point of view of the addressee of the teacher's work, i.e. the student. It provides a model that can be replicated in any other education system. The latent variables, based on a periodically administered questionnaire, could be estimated with data from diagnostic assessments in other countries, which in turn would allow the formulation of context-specific educational policy proposals that take into account student feedback.