As the capstone course in this segment's I/O and applied psychology sequence, PSY8770 synthesizes the major theoretical traditions explaining why people exert effort toward goals, and translates that theory into practical understanding of workplace engagement and performance.
Self-determination theory
Deci and Ryan's framework for intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation
- Three basic psychological needs: PSY8770 covers self-determination theory's central claim that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are universal psychological needs whose satisfaction predicts intrinsic motivation, well-being, and sustained engagement
- The overjustification effect: The course examines the well-documented finding that introducing external rewards for an already intrinsically motivated activity can paradoxically undermine intrinsic motivation for that activity — a finding with direct, sometimes uncomfortable implications for workplace incentive design
- Autonomous versus controlled motivation: PSY8770 distinguishes types of extrinsic motivation along a relative-autonomy continuum (from purely externally controlled to fully internalized/integrated), connecting motivation quality, not just quantity, to performance and well-being outcomes
Expectancy theory
The course covers Vroom's expectancy theory, examining motivation as a function of three multiplicative components: expectancy (the belief that effort will lead to performance), instrumentality (the belief that performance will lead to outcomes/rewards), and valence (the value the individual places on those outcomes) — and the practical implication that motivation efforts targeting only one component (for example, increasing reward value alone) will fail if employees doubt their effort will actually translate into performance or that performance will actually be rewarded.
Goal-setting theory revisited
PSY8770 returns to Locke and Latham's goal-setting theory (introduced in PSY8768's coaching context) with deeper attention to its organizational performance applications — examining the specific, difficult-goal performance advantage, the moderating roles of feedback, goal commitment, and task complexity, and well-documented boundary conditions and critiques, including research on goal-setting's potential unintended consequences (such as encouraging unethical shortcuts or narrowing focus excessively) when goals are poorly designed or excessively rigid.
Motivation, engagement, and performance outcomes
The course connects these motivational theories to the broader organizational construct of employee engagement, examining the research linking psychological need satisfaction and motivation quality to discretionary effort, organizational citizenship behavior, and reduced turnover intention, while critically examining measurement and causality challenges in the engagement research literature — including concerns regarding engagement's conceptual overlap with related but distinct constructs like job satisfaction and organizational commitment.
PSY8770 assignments include motivation theory comparison papers, expectancy theory application cases, and engagement intervention design projects
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Motivation theory comparison papers, expectancy theory application cases, engagement intervention design projects, goal-setting critique papers.
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Frequently asked questions
The overjustification effect is one of the more genuinely counterintuitive findings PSY8770 covers, and it matters practically because it directly challenges a default assumption built into many organizational reward systems — namely, that adding extrinsic rewards on top of an activity people already find inherently engaging or meaningful can only help, or at worst be neutral, in sustaining motivation for that activity. The research tradition behind this finding, building on early experimental work demonstrating the effect and substantially elaborated within self-determination theory's broader framework, found that when people who are already intrinsically motivated to perform an activity (meaning they find the activity inherently interesting, enjoyable, or personally meaningful, independent of any external reward) are then given a salient external reward specifically contingent on performing that same activity, their subsequent intrinsic motivation to engage in the activity in the absence of that reward can actually decrease compared to before the reward was introduced — the reward effectively "crowds out" or displaces part of the person's original intrinsic interest, rather than simply adding extra motivational fuel on top of it. Self-determination theory's cognitive evaluation theory component explains this through the lens of autonomy and the self-determination framework's emphasis on psychological needs: introducing a controlling, contingent external reward can shift the psychological meaning of the activity from being something the person does because they value it (an autonomous, internally driven reason) to something the person does primarily to obtain the reward (an externally controlled reason) — and this shift in the perceived "locus of causality" undermines the autonomy need satisfaction that intrinsic motivation depends on. This has genuinely significant, and somewhat uncomfortable, implications for organizational incentive design that PSY8770 examines directly: a well-intentioned pay-for-performance system layered onto work that employees already find inherently engaging and meaningful is not guaranteed to simply boost motivation further, and depending on how the reward is structured and communicated, could actually erode the intrinsic engagement that was previously sustaining strong performance, particularly if employees come to perceive the reward as controlling rather than as simple positive feedback or information about their competence. The practical nuance PSY8770 emphasizes, however, is that the overjustification effect is not a blanket argument against all extrinsic rewards in organizational settings — the research distinguishes reward structures that are experienced as controlling from those experienced as informational or competence-affirming, and intrinsic motivation concerns are most relevant specifically for tasks that were already intrinsically interesting to begin with, rather than for the large amount of necessary, less inherently engaging work that organizations also need accomplished, where well-designed extrinsic incentives remain an important and appropriate motivational tool without the same risk of crowding out engagement that wasn't present to begin with.