Self-determination theory (SDT) conceptualizes basic psychological needs for autonomyMotivation, or the "energetic forces that initiate work-related behavior and determine its form, direction, intensity and duration" (Pinder, 2008: 11), is a critical issue for organizations and employees. It has been linked to increased employee productivity and organizational revenue, as well as employees' well-being and thriving (Steers, Mowday, & Shapiro, 2004). Given its important role, a good deal of research has focused on the type and extent of motivation employees experience (e.g., Diefendorff & Chandler, 2011;Latham & Pinder, 2005). Within this research area, a prominent focus has been on how the satisfaction of needs, or "some type of internal tension or arousal" (Kanfer, 1990: 81), enhances employee motivation. For example, needs have figured in historical frameworks from Maslow's (1943) need hierarchy to McClelland's (1965) work on needs for achievement, affiliation, and power. More recently, researchers have proposed alternate needs, such as the need for status (Hogan, 1998) and the need for relatedness (Baumeister & Leary, 1995;.Yet few need frameworks have spurred as much research on needs as self-determination theory (SDT; . SDT argues that humans are optimally motivated and experience well-being when they have three basic psychological needs satisfied: the need for autonomy, the need for competence, and the need for relatedness ( The increasing importance and popularity of basic psychological needs in the organizational domain, combined with the lack of any existing reviews on the topic, highlights the need for a conceptual and empirical review of the management research on this topic. 1 To this end, our paper provides a meta-analytic overview of organizational research on basic psychological needs, demonstrating the breadth of constructs (i.e., antecedents and consequences) that basic psychological needs have been found to relate to. We also had three more specific aims with our review: to test SDT's requirement that each basic psychological need should uniquely predict psychological growth, internalization, and well-being; to test whether use of an overall need satisfaction measure is appropriate; and to test whether the scale used to assess basic psychological needs (i.e., the measure developed by Deci et al. In accomplishing these aims, our review provides both contributions and challenges to the SDT literature. In particular, our results indicate research on basic psychological needs is both vibrant and prolific, with need satisfaction relating to a wide variety of antecedents and outcomes. Moreover, we find general support for SDT's requirement that each need should independently predict indicators of psychological growth, internalization, and well-being. However, our findings also illustrate that contrary to SDT, the variance basic psychological needs account for in some of these outcomes is statistically significant but practically insignificant; our review also surfaces issues with the literature's most...
