Richard Ryan, the man who found the secret to motivating workers

Richard Ryan has helped shape our approach to motivating everyone from kids to senior executives.

Motivational expert Richard Ryan

Richard Ryan is a clinical psychologist and co-founder of one of the most influential theories of human behaviour ever developed, a theory that is applied to business, sport, personal relationships, indeed every aspect of social interaction. An American, he worked for decades at the Rochester University with co-founder Edward Deci, researching and teaching their self-determination theory. The theory argues motivation requires three key components: autonomy, mastery or competence, and relatedness. Seven years ago, Ryan left Rochester behind to head The Institute for Positive Psychology and Education at the Australian Catholic University.

Why come to Australia?
This is a research institute so there’s a lot of freedom to pursue the questions I want to pursue. And the academic community these days is international. At ­Rochester I was the director of the clinical training program. So, I was doing a lot of training, so for me personally, when I turned 60, I have a lot of really important research work to do and theory work to do and I decided now is the time for me to turn to that.

Was motivation always a research interest?
When you’re a clinician you see how important ­motivation is to everything, from kids’ engagement in the classroom for learning, to workers, to performance in sport. So, everywhere motivation matters. When I was a young practitioner, most of the theories of motivation were all about how you could control people using reinforcements and punishments or shape them in the right directions, but I was always more interested in how people can change from the inside. How they could move in a direction that is their own choice. I tried to look more towards that inside-out kind of motivation and that is what brought Edward Deci and I together in the 1970s. He had been doing some experimental work on intrinsic motivation and we actually met in a clinical sphere because he also did psychotherapy work. We saw that we had some common ideas.

Has the theory changed over time?
The spirit of this theory hasn’t changed. We’re still ­focused on how people can mobilise their healing and growing energies that they have naturally and what kind of environments release those things. But in the 1970s, we were focused on a particular phenomenon — intrinsic motivation, the joyful engagement people often have in activities because they find the activity itself interesting, and things that undermined or facilitated that.

In the 80s, we really turned to extrinsic motivation and the things that aren’t fun to do, but sometimes you do those willingly because you know how important and valuable they are. And sometimes you do them only because people make you, and so that continuum from alienated all the way up to volitional and extrinsic motivation, that’s what we did in the early 80s. We called that the theory of internalisation.

From there we grew into it. Just generally seeing (that) the things that really shaped autonomous internalisation, intrinsic motivation were the same things that really shape people’s wellbeing. (The idea that) people thrived in settings where their motivation was being nurtured really became a more general area.

Has the idea about the need for relatedness become more interesting to you in recent years?You have spoken a lot about the value of social interactions, of social good.

Well, really from the beginning of the theory, we had the three basic needs — relatedness, autonomy and competence — and earlier we used to argue always about, was one more primary than the others? And we’d kind of settle on, no, they’re all pretty paramount and they’re interactive. Autonomy doesn’t make for a whole relationship but it’s one of the ingredients that makes for a high-quality relationship. So, you have to have both satisfied in a high-quality relationship and that’s true of a good job. You have to have both competence and autonomy to really be satisfied in a job.

But has relatedness become more dominant?
When you’re motivated to do things for others, it satisfies all of people’s basic psychological needs. When you’re helping other people, you’re feeling relatedness. You’re feeling effective and competent and you’re also feeling a sense of agency and autonomy. It’s one of the secrets of happiness as it turns out. Giving to others turns out to be pretty essential.

Are you alarmed when consultants use your theory in simplistic ways?
It’s gratifying to see some information get pulled into popular literature or organisations … And I’m glad that it’s in the dialogue even if sometimes it’s misapplied or over-simplified. I’m an egg-head academic, I think in deep theoretical ways and I’m really appreciative that there are translators sometimes and people who are bringing it to the streets. I have a company too called, motivationWorks, and we try to do that there. Luckily I have some colleagues there who are good at that translation work of helping organisations see the practical value of these ideas of autonomy ­relationships.

One of the things I found is that sometimes somebody will pick up self-determination theory because they’re in sport, or they’ll pick it up because they’re in organisations or because they’re a clinician, and then there are these ‘aha’ experiences because they see right, this applies to my parenting, this applies to my relationship. One of the values of having a general theory is that you can see multiple applications of it across the life spheres. So, to me, that’s one of the strong values of the work we do in SDT.

You and others have done a huge amount of research. Is there anything left to research?
Endless things to research. Some of them are at the scientific level of basic research, like what are the neuro-cognitive mechanisms through which autonomy works? We do a lot of that in our Sydney lab. We have a neuro lab there. We haven’t been able to operate since COVID, but we were doing some really great studies looking at how people access the self-representations they need in order to make good choices. These are basic scientific questions. At the other end of the scale are the social questions: What’s the best social design? What kind of capabilities and resources does a society need to provide for people to have basic psychological need satisfaction?

How should we organise a society?
We’ve been trying to bring together some of the economic models with the self-determination theory model to show that when you have, for instance, freedom from discrimination, that does produce wellbeing and it does help ... by providing autonomy and more opportunity for relatedness and effectiveness in a society. So, it’s really showing this interface between what societies afford, and the differential ­affordances. (When people think) I don’t have rights and privileges in a society or I’m afraid that the police will pull me over or I don’t feel like I have a voice in politics, those things have an impact on people’s wellbeing in part because it disempowers them and so, it leads to certain kinds of amotivation.

You co-wrote a book called Glued to Games in 2011? How do video games relate to motivation?
Glued to Games is now a little bit old, so I think we need a new edition. I got really interested in games back in the early 2000s, because everybody was playing them and, of course, I’m a motivational psychologist. And I think, well what is the motivational pull that has everybody into games? And if there’s something going on there we need to know. It turns out the best games are the ones that really give players this ­really clear competence ramp. So, you can see yourself going up (every) day. There are opportunities for choice, exploration and autonomy within the game and they provide opportunities for connectedness if it’s a social game. And I’ve been able to use that as a model for motivational design, not just for games, but also for apps and health interventions that you can do online. So, that’s been one of the big applications of SDT — how to understand the motivational principles of engagement and put them into the design of technology.

Some people worry that this is not motivation, it’s manipulation.
I’ve been collaborating with Rafael Calvo who used to be at University of Sydney, but is now at Imperial College, London. He’s an engineer. We’ve been writing some works on technological ethics …. when you’re a designer of technology or engineer like Rafael is, you have to think about what is the impact on the needs of the people who are the users of this technology, not just at the buying stage or the interface stage or the user stage, but also in terms of the societal outcomes that occur. Are these things going to be good or bad for people and if not good for them, where is it hurting them?

Has tech been too slow to see the need for an ethical framework?
It’s a hot topic right now and I do think the tech world and the world of engineering do care about this. We see the risks involved in, for instance, artificial intelligence and also in how people’s data gets used. This is an issue of autonomy: when I sign onto something, I often don’t know what I’m agreeing to and you can’t have autonomy if you don’t have knowledge about the consequences and meaning of your actions. Just the issue of feedback alone is an ethical issue. Facebook needs to transparently tell people, what are they going to do with my data? Or the advertiser who comes to me or if I buy something online, what are you doing with my data now that I’ve purchased from you? And those transparencies aren’t there now.

Why did we let it get to this stage as a community?
It’s hard for us to think of it now because it feels like (Big Tech) has been around for a long time, but we’re still in the infancy of technology. We’re still getting our feet on the ground with respect to what it means to be a user of technology. The learning curve is really steep and we’re just at the bottom of it right now. So companies of course were exploiting whatever opportunities they could find in a market. We have to figure out, what does that mean for us? How do we right that? How do we make choices to interface with what they’re doing? I think the informed user needs to get their autonomy back, and we provide the mechanisms through which people can do that and that’s where technology ethics becomes really important.

Is there a particular management style that does best in terms of motivating people?
When we look at management styles, autonomy support is of course really huge at that point, but we also think high structure is good. You need both. You want to have structure and autonomy. So, you want to know, what are my goals? Where am I going? What are the implications of this? What’s the rationale for what I’m doing? Alongside, support to do it in the ways that you want to do it, being able to make inputs or give voice to things along the way. Managers who both have structure and autonomy support really can have a productive workplace, and this is similar in a classroom setting.

Has remote working changed your ideas around motivation?
Some of what I’ve seen in remote work is that managers who used to be able to survey and watch their workers now have people who are working independently. That can make them nervous and over-controlling and even micro managing and I’ve seen some companies even go into monitoring screen time, which I think is undermining. What you actually need in remote work is the opposite. That sense of, I want to do these tasks. I want to volitionally engage and I am going to do that flexibly because I am working at home. I can even bring more to it and my best hours to it. We can maximise the benefits of remote work but we have to provide the right mangerial atmosphere.

How does the idea of curiosity fit into the self-determination theory?
We started with curiosity … in our early fights with behaviourists. The reason that we were in a fight is because we were arguing that there are a lot of behaviours that just come from the inside spontaneously because people are interested. We were really interested in curiosity. It’s kind of a basic human motive or expression of intrinsic motivation that could be undermined by trying to control it with rewards, but could be facilitated by giving people choice and opportunities and experiences. We really began with the idea that humans are curiosity animals as Konrad Lorenz used to call it. Curiosity is innate. We are a curious animal and that is our nature, but it’s more robust if you grow up in an environment that supports your exploratory tendencies, that is responsive to you and that provides you with optimal kinds of stimulation that don’t over-control or constrain your behaviour. Those things are important to building curiosity and intrinsic motivation and that learning capacity and you see those individual differences develop as a function of either supportive or of controlling environments.