Evaluating Perceptions of Basic Psychological Needs in Full-Time Employees

The climate of the current workplace has changed drastically within the past few years, as a result of many jobs moving to remote work. Many employees have had to learn how to adjust to dealing with the physical separation of leadership, as well as balance their own basic psychological needs in a new environment. These three needs, autonomy, competence, and relatedness, are important workplace predictors that still need further exploration in the remote workplace. This study samples from both remote and in-person workers, providing a clear comparison of how the change in workplace setting impacts an employee’s perception of leader-member quality, as well as their basic psychological needs. We hypothesized that LMX would have a significant and positive impact on each basic psychological need. We also hypothesized that remote work will moderate the relationship between LMX and each basic psychological need, such that the positive relationship will be stronger for non-remote workers than remote workers. Participants consisted of 241 full-time employees, 123 in-person workers and 118 remote workers. Results show that while the correlation between LMX and each basic psychological need were significant, they were not statistically different between work locations. This has implications for how the basic psychological needs can be fulfilled in the remote environment, challenging the assumption that the in-person environment is better at fostering better leader relationships and significance of the impact on the employee.

Hi everyone! My name is Jessica Luther and this is my project, Evaluating Basic Psychological Needs in Full-Time Employees. This study was done with the help of Dr. Kuykendall, and represents my research conducted for the third semester of the Honors in Psychology program. Since COVID, there’s been more flexibility in allowing employees to have part-time and full-time positions working remotely. Prior research shows that perception of leader quality is a predictor for employee well-being which has been studied in both the in-person and remote environments. The perception of someone’s basic psychological needs has also been seen to change the remote environment, a result of whether it be not seeing people, or whether it be feelings of social isolation. Basic psychological need perception has also changed. Connecting these three topics, since COVID we have seen a lot of people moving to remote positions, and a lot of the recent research in remote work kind of reflects how leader quality or leadership styles are impacting employees, specifically, the outcomes such as autonomy, motivation, a lot of stress-related outcomes as well. So, for this study to provide a direct comparison between in-person and remote employees we looked at how leader member exchange, which is noted as LMX, or also known as the perception of leader quality, is moderated by remote work and how remote work changes the relationship that someone might have with their leader or the perception of the quality they have with their leader and how that impacts their three basic psychological needs, which are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. My hypotheses are split into two parts, you have hypotheses 1a through 1c. This deals with direct associations between LMX and autonomy, LMX and competence, and LMX and relatedness. Prior research shows LMX is positively related to autonym, competence and relatedness, so we assume the same thing for this study. Hypotheses 2a, 2b, and 2c are where my contribution to the research comes in. It suggests that remote work moderates this relationship so remote work will moderate the relationship between LMX and each basic psychological need, such that the positive relationship will be stronger for no-remote workers than remote workers. Basically, insinuating that we will see that autonomy, competence and relatedness are both significant and stronger for in-person employees rather than remote employees. So, my participants were 241 full-time employees, 51% worked in-person, 49% worked remotely. We did not include any hybrid workers or anyone who worked part-time just to have a more balanced sample of who we were sampling from so full-time in this case was defined as working 35 plus hours per week. 42.3% were male, 55.2% were female, and 2.5% identified as non-binary. They were excluded if they worked part-time, were hybrid workers, or resided somewhere other than the U.S.. So, the methodology for this was that they were recruited on Prolific, which is an anonymous survey taking website, and the survey itself took place on Qualtrics. The two instruments used were the LMX-7, which measures perceived leader-member quality, or leader-member exchange, and Self Determination Theory 21, or SDT-21 Basic Psychological Needs at Work Scale, which measures each basic psychological need through statements that were tested using a Likert scale. Participants, for their participation, were compensated 2.85%. So, for the results, we ran a correlational analysis between LMX and SDT, separating remote participants from in-person participants, so that we would be able to directly compare their results. We actually found that each component of self-determination theory, autonomy, competence, and relatedness, was significant with LMX in both groups. So Hypotheses 1a-1c were supported, which was expected because we’ve already seen this in prior research, However, Hypotheses 2a-2c were not supported. Even though each component was significant for in-person, through further testing we found that while everything was significant, they were significantly different so the correlations between LMX and SDT of in-person workers was not significantly different than LMX and SDT of remote workers. That suggests that these needs can be filled in both environments. The implications for this show how leadership perceptions might not really change based on environments, and even then, it’s not statistically significant between the two environments themselves, and actually remote work can still be a supporting environment, given that people have supportive leadership roles and supportive leaders that they can count on. One of the studies that I read noted that social isolation was a really really big concern, which could really damage someone’s feelings of relatedness. However, as seen in the table, relatedness was still significant in remote workers using LMX, so having that supportive leadership role really can help fill the need for relatedness. Further research should take into account what hybrid work or part time work might reveal because those are really samples as well. Knowing how different samples perceive different leadership styles is really important to understanding how leaders can support their employees and how leaders can really help fulfill some of these psychological needs. For my acknowledgements, I wanted to say that this couldn’t have been done without OSCAR funding, it was used to help compensate the participants for their participants, and I also wanted to thank Dr. Brielmaier, Dr. Zaccaro, and Dr. Z for all their help in my project as well. Thank you.