Three Words to Remember When Working with People’s Motivation and Productivity: Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness to Others
This talk will highlight the view of cognitive psychologists on DP and DX. It aims to help DPEs in their decisions about people and processes, providing them with a short and useful theoretical framework taken from social and organizational psychology.
In this talk, I will uncover how the senses of being autonomous, competent, and related to other people (a.k.a. The Self-Determination Theory’s three main pillars) influence satisfaction, efficiency, and communication dimensions, and thus overall developer productivity and experience.
I will dissect the Self-Determination Theory and discuss concrete strategies to foster developers’ subjective experiences within your teams to boost their satisfaction and productivity based on comprehensive research data.
Here are a few examples of how autonomy, competence, and relatedness to others manifest themselves in the everyday tasks of software developers.:
- Developers’ feeling of autonomy is higher when coding and lower when they are in meetings or writing emails.
- Developers’ feeling of competence drops when they are bugfixing
- When developers help colleagues, they experience higher levels of competence and relatedness to a team (Russo et al., 2023).
Having in mind three core subjective feelings – feeling of autonomy, competence, and relatedness – when making decisions either about people problems or about tooling, will boost satisfaction and productivity in your engineering teams.
