| How to improve intrinsic motivation has always been an essential problem for managers.They hope that employees regard the job as a lifelong career and enjoy the work process.They also expect that employees have the sense of mission and the subjective initiative to reach the self-driven state.With the approaching of the innovation-driven knowledge economy era and artificial intelligence era,pioneering,creative,research-based mental work become more widespread and vital.The inherent characteristics,which are closely related to intrinsic motivation,have become more demanding,such as organizational identity,competence,initiative spirit,tenacity,passion and so on.Therefore,the improvement of intrinsic motivation is a very important proposition in innovation-driven knowledge economy era.However,intrinsic motivation is like a rock that is hard to move.Managers try to use material rewards,performance evaluation and other ways,but resulting little effect.Employees'intrinsic motivation urgently needs effective way to promote.The competition mechanism is the source which makes the market economy full of vitality.The competition incentive mechanism within enterprises has been regarded as an important means to mobilize the employee's subjective initiative and enhance the vitality and creativity of the staff.However,the relationship between competition and intrinsic motivation is unclear as scholars engage in a heated dispute over the positive impact of competition on motivation.Actually,the competition is indeed a double edged sword.It is easy to get confused without a systematic theoretical framework of competition elements and levels.It is worth to resolve disputes by further exploration.As one of the mainstream theories of motivation,Self-determination Theory(SDT)demonstrates that individuals have three innate psychological needs,which are autonomy,competence and relatedness respectively.The satisfaction of one's basic psychological needs is found to significantly influence one's intrinsic motivation,which provides important theoretical guidance for the study in competition situation.SDT was proposed in the late last century.In 2005,an article titled"Self-determination and work motivation" was published on Journal of Organizational Behavior,which is one of the top-tier management journals.Since then,more management scholars get to know SDT and start to apply it into management studies.It is a pity that Chinese management scholars are still not familiar enough with this theory up till now,and few empirical studies have been conducted based on this theory,especially in the competition situation.Based 'on SDT,this study aims to explore the instant influence and profound influence of competition on intrinsic motivation through a series of experiments,from the perspective of the satisfaction of competence needs.We are concerned about how the competition elements which are closely related to the satisfaction of competence needs affect intrinsic motivation from different temporal perspectives.We also care about what should be the main focus of the competitive incentive mechanism to maximize the intrinsic motivation of the individuals.The above is the main line of the thesis.To attain the research goal,intrinsic motivation should be measured by a method with the characteristics of high time resolution and high stability,and the function of real-time monitoring.At the beginning of this century,with the development of functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalogram(EEG)technology as well as the trend of interdisciplinary research incorporating Cognitive Neuroscience into Economy,Management and Psychology,the research field of Neuroeconomics and Neuromanagement were put forward.Resorting to cognitive neuroscience methods,researchers get to inquire into cognitive mechanisms underlying one's decision making processes and social behaviors.As a mainstream neuroscientific technique,Event-related Potential(ERP)has a rather high temporal resolution and can reflect the intrinsic motivation during the process of a certain task.Since 2014,researchers in the field of management and psychology have begun to use ERP components to indicate different levels of one's intrinsic motivation in sub-stages.The publication of a series of papers has built a solid foundation of using ERP in intrinsic motivation studies,which provides an authoritative reference for our research.This paper contains three studies.In Study 1,through a behavioral experiment,we examined the effects of competition challenge on one's intrinsic motivation.With four participants in a group,we created three different levels of competition challenge,which are high competition challenge,low competition challenge and no competition challenge.Self-report method and free choice method were adopted to measure the level of one's intrinsic motivation.What's more,we paid special attention to an important task attribute,which is the task difficulty.It may affect individual's competence and play a role of moderator in the relationship between the challenge of the competition and one's intrinsic motivation.In the overall framework of this paper,Study 1 explores the impact of competition challenge on individual competence and intrinsic motivation,which provides reference for subsequent research hypotheses and method selection.In addition,it provides information for the task difficulty manipulation in the follow-up studies.Study 2 mainly focused on the instant influence of competition on one's intrinsic motivation.In the competition process,the most important competition element which is closely related to the satisfaction of competence needs is the competition challenge.We created four different levels of competition challenge,which are the blowout condition,the narrow win condition,the near miss condition and the complete defeat condition,by two-player online stopwatch task.We resorted to the ERP approach and used the Stimulus-preceding negativity(SPN)as a neural index of one's intrinsic motivation.Study 3 mainly focused on the profound influence of competition challenge on one's intrinsic motivation.After the competition,the most important competition element which is closely related to the satisfaction of competence needs is the competition result.Participants were randomly divided into three groups,which are success group,failure group and control group.Each group had to undergo three stages of experiment.The varied competition results were manipulated in the second stage of the experiment.Thus,the discrepancies of intrinsic motivation in the third and first stages among different groups were observed.We resorted to the ERP approach and used the Feedback-related negativity(FRN)and differentiated FRN(d-FRN)as the neural indexes of one's intrinsic motivation.At the same time,the distribution of attention was characterized by the P300 component.Through the above three studies,this paper has obtained the following three basic conclusions.Firstly,from the perspective of instant influence,the balance between competition challenge and one's competence is critical for the maintenance of intrinsic motivation.Optimal competition challenge,compared with a lack of challenge and overwhelming challenge,maximizes one's perceived competence and then enhances one's intrinsic motivation.The inverted U-shaped curvilinear relationship between confronted competition challenge and one's intrinsic motivation is validated,reflected by the different amplitudes of SPN in varied conditions.Secondly,from the perspective of profound influence,the competition results in the previous stage can predict the level of intrinsic motivation in the next stage.Specifically,in the failure group,competence frustration in the current stage will enhance one's intrinsic motivation in the next stage.In the success group,as individuals feel competent,intrinsic motivation will not show significant difference between the current stage and the next stage.This conclusion is mainly reflected by the amplitude discrepancies of d-FRN between different stages in varied participant groups.Thirdly,the task difficulty plays a role of moderator in the relationship between the challenge of the competition and one's intrinsic motivation.If the participant perceived a good match between task difficulty and one's capacity,the competition challenge will significantly influence one's intrinsic motivation.If the task demand is well above one's capacity,the competition challenge will be hard to play a role.This is an exploratory study in the competition context that adopts a cognitive neuroscience approach to examine one's intrinsic motivation.Considerable contributions have been made to both Management and Cognitive Neuroscience.To begin with,from the perspective of instant influence,the research demonstrates that the balance between competition challenge and one's competence is critical for the maintenance of intrinsic motivation.In the management practice,making the competition challenge a close match with individual ability is helpful to stimulate one's intrinsic motivation.Secondly,the current study has carried on the beneficial extension of SDT from the perspective of profound influence.Competence frustration caused by competition failure has the potential positive effect,which verifies the self-recovery and regulation mechanism of individual psychological and behavioral system.In the management practice,after the failure of competition,assigning a task that satisfies one's competence needs can help the individual adjust the personal state.Thirdly,we have confirmed the speculation in the Flow Theory and SDT from the converging electrophysio logical evidences.The review article "The Neuroscience of Growth Mindset and Intrinsic Motivation" recommends our research with a long paragraph about our research topic,experiment task,conclusion and the cognitive neuroscience approach used to examine one's intrinsic motivation.The review article indicates that applying EEG to examine one's intrinsic motivation is very interesting and well complements classical behavioral approaches.Fourthly,this paper takes a comparatively novel perspective of competitive arousal and establishes an important link between incentive mechanism of competition and SDT.Specifically,SDT provides a fundamental theoretical foundation for competitive arousal with a basic psychological need orientation.Last but not least,we developed the two-player online stopwatch task,which has the characteristics of strong interactivity and timely feedback.It provides a basic task paradigm for future competition-related research. |
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