This work considers the notion that for personality psychology to move forward, there is a need to distinguish and integrate different theories and areas of research into a truly comprehensive framework (McAdams & Pals, 2006).
In comparison, general causality orientations are defined as ‘‘individual differences in degrees of internalized self-regulation” (Deci & Ryan, 1985, p. 111), which are orientations towards stable tendencies in cognition, affect, and behavior. These orientations originate in the well-established and widely researched theory of motivation, Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 2000).
SDT proponents claim that humans have evolved activity and growth potentials. (인간은 활동성과 성장 잠재력을 진화시켜 왔다) These potentials (activity and growth potentials) are achieved through satisfaction of basic psychological needs: Specifically, the need for autonomy, feeling that one’s behavior is self-organized and valued; the need for competence, feeling that one is capable, confident, and effective; and the need for relatedness, feeling that one is connected in relationships and communities (Deci & Ryan, 2000). SDT argues that humans experience social environments as need-facilitating or need-thwarting, and that these experiences develop into enduring individual differences in internalized self-regulation, namely general causality orientations (Deci & Ryan, 1985).
> In Personal Development: Potential refers to a person's ability to grow, develop new skills, or achieve success based on their talents, traits, or circumstances. For example, "She has the potential to be a great leader."
> Over time, repeated experiences in such environments shape how we regulate our own behavior. This regulation becomes an internal pattern—a stable part of our personality or motivational style. For example, someone who grows up in an environment that supports autonomy might develop into a self-motivated, confident individual. In contrast, someone from a controlling environment might become overly dependent on external approval.
> "Internalized self-regulation" refers to the way people control their own behavior based on what they've learned from their environment. It’s called “internalized” because these patterns are absorbed into the self—they guide behavior even when no one else is watching.
Individual differences in degrees of internalized self-regulation are operationalized in the General Causality Orientation Scale (GCOS; Deci & Ryan, 1985), which contains three dimensions that have been well-validated in prior research: (1) The Autonomy causality orientation (Autonomy), referring to a tendency towards high degrees of internalized self-regulation, such as experiencing behavior and choices as free and volitional and in accordance with one’s own standards and beliefs; (2) the Control causality orientation (Control), referring to a tendency towards low degrees of internalized self-regulation, such as experiencing behavior and choices as conflicted and pressured by imperatives in social norms and cultural values; and (3) the Impersonal causality orientation (Impersonal), referring to a tendency towards lacking degrees of internalized self-regulation, such as experiencing behavior and choices as inefficient, incomprehensible, and beyond intentional control.
Halvari, H., & Olafsen, A. H. (2020). Causality orientations in the work setting: Scale development and validation.
McAdams (1985) proposed that what Erikson (1963) conceived as the young-adult struggle to develop an identity should be reconceptualized as the psychosocial effort to articulate and internalize a story about the self—a self-narrative that reconstructs the past and imagines the future in such a way as to explain (for the self and others) who I am, how I came to be, and where my life may be going. In adulthood, a person’s life story—what is now termed narrative identity—provides his or her life with some semblance of unity and purpose while specifying a psychosocial niche in the adult world of love, work, and commitment (see also Hammack, 2008; McLean, Pasupathi, & Pals, 2007).
Narrative identity becomes part of personality in adulthood, joining forces with those features of personality that have been around, developmentally speaking, for a longer time—that is, dispositional traits and motives/goals/values/and so on. As originally and consistently conceived, narrative identity is a developmental emergence.
We now see a developmental logic as providing the most intellectually satisfying understanding of the relations between dispositional traits, motives and goals (and related constructs), and life stories. Rather than thinking about these three features as levels in a strict hierarchy, therefore, we argue that they are best viewed as successively emerging layers of personality development.
The details of and empirical evidence for the developmental argument are spelled out in McAdams and Adler (2006) and McAdams and Olson (2010). The three-step logic goes like this: We begin life as social actors, endowed with the temperament tendencies that will eventually morph into the dispositional traits that so strongly shape social performance while also comprising the first layer of personality. A second layer begins to take form in the elementary school years, when children become self-consciously motivated agents who set forth goals, projects, and value-driven programs for their lives, and direct their behavior accordingly. As Layers 1 (dispositional traits; the self as actor) and 2 (personal goals and their motivational accoutrements; the self as agent) continue to develop over time, a third layer eventually emerges (especially important under the aegis of cultural modernity; McAdams, 1996) when the young adult confronts the identity challenges of his or her society and begins to author a narrative identity. As we move through adulthood, personality continues to develop, with life stories layered over goals and motives, which are layered over dispositional traits.
(...) Personality begins with traits— the developmental foundation. Personal goals (goals that consistently differentiate you from me) emerge later, after the child has (a) developed the realization that people’s behavior is largely motivated by internalized goals (theory of mind; Wellman, 1993) and (b) come to understand his or her own daily life in terms of choices made, intentions realized or thwarted, and success and failure in goal pursuit. The agent’s relative accomplishments in important goal domains become a strong determinant of self-esteem in middle childhood and beyond (Harter, 2006; James, 1892/1963). Traits shape the style of our action tendencies (self as actor); goals spell out what we (recurrently) want (self as agent).
Most interesting and complex of all are adults. Even as dispositional traits and motivational goals continue to develop and impact daily life, a third layer of personality begins to emerge as young adults seek an identity in the world. As Erikson suggested, identity is an arrangement of the self that manages to provide adult life with some degree of unity and purpose.
As a product of the self’s desire to make meaning out of the complexities of adult life (especially as played out against the backdrop of a modern society), identity can come to include many different psychological qualities. But central to the identity quest in adulthood is the psychosocial construction of a life story.
That story—narrative identity—joins the personality team in adulthood, and as the story changes, personality itself changes, even if dispositional traits show remarkable stability over time. In any given life, traits may impact goals and stories, goals may impact stories and traits, and stories may impact traits and goals. Still, the three members of the team are not exactly equals.
Traits have been around, in one form or another, from the very beginning. Their developmental seniority, rooted as it may be in genetically driven and epigenetically constructed temperament tendencies, may give them more power to constrain life stories, compared to the power that life stories may have to constrain traits. Still, dispositional traits, personal goals and motives, and narrative identity develop on their own paths across the life course, making it impossible to reduce one layer to another. In adulthood, we move through life as social actors, motivated agents, and autobiographical authors, revealing and expressing the full panoply of psychological individuality—all three layers of personality—at any given time or place.
McAdams, D. P., & Manczak, E. (2011). What is a “level” of personality?. Psychological Inquiry, 22(1), 40-44.
There are many points of view to interpret employees work behaviors. Personality is considered as the major factor in anticipating performance and behavior in the workplace. Hagger and Chatzisarantis (2011) suggested that environmental and interpersonal factors are both important when predicting individual behaviors. Other research has also suggested that the self is not the only motivational force at work, only because the self develops within the social environment: the ongoing integrative process can be nurtured, but it can also be derailed by the social context (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Vansteenkiste & Sheldon, 2006). As a new taxonomy of personality, General Causality Orientations (Deci & Ryan, 1985a, 1985b) with the environment and personal characteristics have gained widely attention.
In this paper, we will explore how General Causality Orientations (Deci & Ryan, 1985a, 1985b) represent an attempt to link environment and motivation with personality. Lam and Gurland (2008) found that autonomy orientation positively predicted self-determined work motivation, which in turn predicted job outcomes, namely job satisfaction and identification commitment. King and Gurland (2007) proved that autonomy orientation was associated with the detail/complexity dimension of creativity, perhaps consistent with Sheldon’s (1995) analysis of autonomy integrally related to trait creativity. Hagger and Chatzisarantis (2011) observed that participants in a “non-rewarded” condition with autonomy orientation exhibit higher levels of intrinsic motivation compared to participants with a control orientation. This research provides an indication that causality orientations exert a powerful influence on the interpretation and prediction of events, like work performance or organizational behaviors.
This research also clarifies characteristics of General Causality Orientations and briefly distinguishes the relationship between General Causality Orientations and the Five-Factor Model; then discusses the importance of employees’ evaluation within human resource management through General Causality Orientations of personality. Each of these orientations, if managed effectively, may contribute to both individual’s work adjustment and organizational effectiveness.
2 GENERAL CAUSALITY ORIENTATIONS
General Causality Orientations originate from the theory of motivation, Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 1985a). The basic assumption of the Self-Determination Theory is that individuals are active, growth-oriented organisms; with innate and natural tendencies toward developing a more elaborated and unified identity (Soenens, et al., 2005). Central to the Self-Determination Theory are claims that human growth and activity potential are inherent and achieved through satisfaction of basic psychological needs for experiencing autonomy, competence and relatedness (Deci & Ryan, 2000). The theory could be characterized as a predominantly social psychological theory because of its strong emphasis on contextual determinants of need satisfaction, experiences and emotions that ensure internalization and self-regulation of behaviors (Olesen, 2011). The Self-Determination Theory argues that humans experience social environments as need-facilitating or need-thwarting, and that these experiences develop into enduring individual differences in internalized self-regulation, namely General Causality Orientations (Deci & Ryan, 1985a).
General Causality Orientation (GCO; Deci & Ryan, 1985b) is an individual difference variable that refers to people’s tendency to orient toward particular kinds of social or environmental input, and their particular interpretations. Causality orientations refer to people’s general motivational stance towards a broad range of behaviors and attitudes, hence, the way in which they deal with identity concerns (i.e. their identity styles) (Deci & Ryan, 1985a; Ryan & Deci, 2003). Deci (1980) implied that General Causality Orientations can be usefully characterized in terms of people’s (explicit or implicit) understanding the nature of causation of behavior. Nowadays, Causality orientation is a stable disposition over time and across domains.
2.1 Autonomy Orientation
The autonomy orientation involves a high degree of experienced choice with respect to the initiation and regulation of one’s own behavior (Deci & Ryan, 1985a). Autonomy-oriented people seek out opportunities for self-determination and choice (Deci & Ryan, 1985a). Hagger and Chatzisarantis (2011) pointed out that in the mechanism for autonomy causality orientation, individuals are more likely to interpret rewards and other potentially controlling environmental contingencies as opportunities to demonstrate competence and, as a consequence, more likely to exhibit intrinsic motivation with respect to tasks. Autonomous individuals take into account the advice of credible, well informed experts, which suggests that they seek the most reliable information before making choices (Koestner et al., 1999).
2.2 Control Orientation
The control orientation involves people’s behavior being organized with respect to controls, either in the environment or within themselves. Control-oriented people seek out, select, or interpret events as controlling (Deci & Ryan, 1985a). Highly control-oriented people tend to do things because they think they “should”, and their motivation relies on extrinsic events such as deadlines or surveillance which play a more determinative role in their behavior (Deci & Ryan, 1985a). Other research has found that greater effort exerted on the task was associated with higher control orientation, and under threat of evaluation (Bober & Grolnick, 1995; Koestner, Bernieri, & Zuckerman, 1992), interpreted how much the highly control-oriented people are susceptible to environmental controls.
3 CHARACTERISTICS OF GENERAL CAUSALITY ORIENTATIONS
Compared to other personality traits, causality orientations have mainly two enablers to explain aspects of personality through stable individual differences in a different way.
Firstly, within the Self-Determination Theory, causality orientations are not considered unequivocally orthogonal nor are they considered directly deterministic of the types of motivation likely experienced by an individual in a given context (Deci & Ryan, 1985a). Instead, causality orientations can be viewed as reflecting a continuum ranging from high to low levels of generalized perceptions of self-determination with respect to action (Hagger & Chatzisarantis, 2011). It is therefore possible that an individual can have both autonomy and control orientations and that the relative contribution of these causality orientations over action may vary across context.
Secondly, as importantly, the Self-Determination Theory posits two perspectives with respect to the antecedent factors that support or undermine intrinsic motivation: environmental and interpersonal factors (Hagger & Chatzisarantis, 2011). Causality orientations are viewed as interaction with environmental contingencies in terms of determining the level of intrinsic motivation of an individual who is likely to experience motivation in a given context or with respect to a particular action (Deci & Ryan, 1985a; Koestner & Zuckerman, 1994). As predicted by the Self-Determination Theory, a person’s General Causality Orientations is associated with the way they interpret situational factors (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999; Deci & Ryan, 1985b). Thus, a situational factor might have different effects on individuals with different causality orientations, whereas environmental and interpersonal factors may have interaction variation in interpreting a person’s behavior. (Hagger & Chatzisarantis, 2011).
6 DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATION
Causality orientations can be viewed in terms of motivational, social-cognitive, and developmental adaptations of dispositional traits (McAdams & Pals, 2006). This means that causality orientations can be understood as characteristic adaptations of personality, and thereby they should be influenced by both dispositional traits and by contingencies in psychosocial contexts (Hodgins et al., 2006; Lynch et al., 2009; Sheldon et al., 1997). Because of its characteristic, General Causality Orientations can be applied for assessing position of organization and predicting work performance.
For theoretical contribution, our results may not only enrich the relationship between GCO and work behavior, but also expand the scope of application of Self-Determination theory.
> 내꺼 For theoretical contribution, this research may not only enrich the relationship between causality orientations and work behavior, but also expand the scope of application of Self-Determination theory.
Furthermore, distinguishing General Causality Orientations from the Five Factor Model is an important step to rule out redundancy, particularly when dealing with individual personality differences (John, Naumann, & Soto, 2008), thus, establishing the conceptual independence of causality orientations from personality traits may serve as a prerequisite for efforts to integrate the two theories (e.g., Deponte, 2004). Since the two theories are typically classic personality taxonomies, and there have been overlap between them, we may use the two theories together to measure employees work behaviors.
For empirical contribution, new theory is available to direct human resource management activities. Firstly, base on applicants’ orientation, managers can recruit and choose employees for specific position. Autonomy-orientated people may have a high level of intrinsic work motivation without external reward. At the same time, they prefer to recognize supportive-environments and seek out opportunities for self-determination and choice. Hagger and Chatzisarantis (2011) found that autonomy orientation has a tendency to offer individuals a degree of “protection”
Ye, L., Zhang, J., & Hocine, Z. (2013). The role of general causality orientations in interpreting and predicting employees behavior in the workplace. Review in Psychology Research, 2(4), 53-60.
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