What is motivation-supportive leadership?
Motivation-supportive leadership creates conditions in which people can understand and internalise worthwhile goals, exercise meaningful choice, build competence, and experience respectful connection.
Reflect on whether your management supports autonomy, competence, and relatedness while maintaining clear expectations and fair conditions.
Answer as you are today
Choose the answer that best describes your recent behaviour at work. No email required.
What does motivation-supportive leadership mean?
Motivation-supportive leadership creates conditions in which people can understand and internalise worthwhile goals, exercise meaningful choice, build competence, and experience respectful connection.
Why it matters at work
Leaders cannot inject motivation into another person. They can shape job design, fairness, resources, feedback, meaning, and how external demands are communicated. Compensation and accountability still matter; the issue is how they interact with autonomy and purpose.
What this assessment measures
Autonomy & rationale
Providing meaningful discretion, explaining constraints, and avoiding unnecessary control.
Competence & progress
Matching challenge with capability, feedback, resources, and visible progress.
Relatedness & fairness
Building respect, belonging, contribution, and credible organisational conditions.
How to interpret your score
Your overall result is normalised to a 0–100 scale. Use it to choose a practice area, not to compare your worth with somebody else.
Build your motivation-supportive leadership foundation
Your answers identify situations where one visible practice could make this capability more dependable.
A developing motivation-supportive leadership pattern
You use this capability in some conditions. Focus on the dimension that becomes least reliable under pressure.
A strong motivation-supportive leadership pattern
Your answers suggest a reliable pattern. Keep testing it against harder work and evidence from people affected.
Designed for reflection, not diagnosis
The ten behaviour-based statements cover 3 practical dimensions. Responses run from “Never” to “Almost always”; negatively worded items are reverse-scored. Overall and dimension results are converted to a 0–100 scale. The assessment is educational and has not been psychometrically validated.
Read the full assessment methodology and editorial standards.
Research that informed this page
Marylène Gagné and Edward L. Deci (2005), “Self-Determination Theory and Work Motivation”, Journal of Organizational Behavior.