What is autonomy?
In our blog post about what makes us motivated, we went through the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. We also described that all people have three basic psychological needs that leaders can work with to create the right conditions for staff to feel and perform well: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The need for autonomy means that we want be included and have influence, we want to participate and understand why we do different things. In this blog post, you get concrete tips on behavior in a leader that promotes autonomy, and we also give examples of behavior that counteract autonomy and thereby employee engagement.
What leadership supports autonomy?
Leadership that supports autonomy is about creating an experience of high self-governance. Here are some concrete examples of behavior that support autonomy:
- Explain the purpose of everything you do - how does this help the coworker
- Let the coworkers make their own decisions about how and where they should solve their tasks
- Let the coworkers participate in goals, routines, work, etc
- Care about what drives your coworkers and how they want to develop personally, not just professionally
- Use a non-controlling language: 'I would appreciate', 'it would really help us if you…'
- Give the coworkers freedom to control their time, as much as you possibly can
Behavior that hurts the need for autonomy
If you see or do any of the following, you should watch out. Here are examples of leadership that hurts the need for autonomy, thereby reducing employee engagement:
- Micro management
- Too detailed following up
- Too much policies
- Too controlling processes
- Purposes that do not relate to the coworker, e.g. making more money for the owners
- Controlling language: 'I want you to', 'you must', 'you should', 'you need'
- Allowing too much freedom without guide lines
