How different types of motives affect performance and growth
Amy Wrzesniewski and Barry Schwartz have written an opinion piece in the New York Times about effective motivation ( read here ). In the piece they distinguish two types of motivation: internal motivation and instrumental motivation. These terms correspond two other terms which are more well-known in the psychological literature. Internal motivation corresponds to autonomous motivation; instrumental motivation corresponds to controlled motivation. They did a study to examine how these two types of motivation affected performance ( Wrzesniewski et al (2014 ).