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The beliefs that underlie autonomy-supportive and controlling teaching: A multinational investigation

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Abstract

We investigated the role of three beliefs in predicting teachers’ motivating style toward students—namely, how effective, how normative, and how easy-to-implement autonomy-supportive and controlling teaching were each believed to be. We further examined national collectivism–individualism as a predictor of individual teachers’ motivating style and beliefs about motivating style, as we expected that a collectivistic perspective would tend teachers toward the controlling style and toward positive beliefs about that style. Participants were 815 full-time PreK-12 public school teachers from eight different nations that varied in collectivism–individualism. All three teacher beliefs explained independent and substantial variance in teachers’ self-described motivating styles. Believed effectiveness was a particularly strong predictor of self-described motivating style. Collectivism–individualism predicted which teachers were most likely to self-describe a controlling motivating style, and a mediation analysis showed that teachers in collectivistic nations self-described a controlling style because they believed it to be culturally normative classroom practice. These findings enhance the literature on the antecedents of teachers’ motivating styles by showing that teacher beliefs strongly predict motivating style, and that culture informs one of these beliefs—namely, normalcy.

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Notes

  1. The Bedouin society is a predominately desert-dwelling Arab ethnic group organized more by tribal affiliation than by nationality. Bedouins generally live a semi-nomadic lifestyle and populate mostly the nations of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Syria. The tribal society included in the present study consisted of settled citizens living in the southern part of Israel.

  2. The three excluded items were (from the Believed Effectiveness scale), “Do you like and think positively of this approach to teaching, or do you dislike and think negatively of it?” [“Dislike it: think negatively of it” to “Like it; think positively of it”], (from the Believed Normalcy scale), “Does this teaching scenario describe what others (fellow teachers, parents, students) expect you to do as a teacher?” [“No, it is not what they expect of me” to “Yes, it is what they expected of me”], and (from the Believed Ease-of-Implementation scale), “How realistic and practical (vs. naïve and impractical) is this approach to teaching for your teaching situation?” [“Extremely naïve, impractical” to “Extremely realistic, practical”].

  3. Specifically, national individualism correlated significantly with the magnitude of the factor intercorrelation between the Believed Effectiveness and Believed Normalcy beliefs on both the autonomy-supportive, r(8) = .74, p < .05, and controlling, r(8) = .68, p = .06, teaching questionnaires. This means that teachers in collectivistic societies generally did not conceptualize what was normative to be the same as what was effective, while teachers in individualistic societies teachers did (i.e., the two beliefs were strongly positively correlated such that what was believed to be normative was also what was believed to be effective).

  4. For the three samples that did include within-culture ethnic variability, one-way ANOVAs showed that ethnicity did not relate to any of the three measures of motivating style.

  5. To calculate these effect sizes, we used \( d = 2t/\sqrt N \) (Hunter and Schmidt 2004).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the WCU (World Class University) Program funded by the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, consigned to the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation (Grant No. R32-2008-000-20023-0).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Education, Korea University, 633 Uncho-Useon Hall, Anam-Dong Seongbuk-Gu, Seoul, 136-701, Korea

    Johnmarshall Reeve

  2. Department of Developmental, Personality, and Social Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Maarten Vansteenkiste

  3. Department of Education, Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba, Israel

    Avi Assor

  4. Counseling and Educational Psychology Department, University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan

    Ikhlas Ahmad

  5. Department of Physical Education, Korea University, Seoul, Korea

    Sung Hyeon Cheon

  6. Department of Education, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea

    Hyungshim Jang

  7. Center for Motivation and Self-Determination, Kaye Academic College of Education, Beersheba, Israel

    Haya Kaplan

  8. Department of Educational Studies, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Jennifer D. Moss

  9. Institute of Educational Research, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Bodil Stokke Olaussen

  10. National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    C. K. John Wang

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  1. Johnmarshall Reeve
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Except for the three lead authors, authors’ names are listed in alphabetical order to reflect that all authors contributed equally to the completion of the study.

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Reeve, J., Vansteenkiste, M., Assor, A. et al. The beliefs that underlie autonomy-supportive and controlling teaching: A multinational investigation. Motiv Emot 38, 93–110 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-013-9367-0

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