Case Study 1 — Chapter 22: Goals, Intrinsic Motivation, and Achievement

Jordan: After the Answer

Background

The initiative is complete. Not finished in the sense of being shut down — it is transitioning into operational management, which means it will continue producing value without requiring Jordan's intensive personal investment. But the proposal phase, the Warren negotiation, the implementation, the presentation to senior leadership: these are done.

His manager Sandra has told him that based on the initiative's success, there will be a new role available in Q2. Not the next level — two levels. Strategic Director for Customer Experience. He would manage a team of twelve, have budget authority for the first time in his career, and shape the company's customer strategy for the next three years.

He is, on paper, achieving exactly what the last two years of effort were building toward.

He is also sitting in his kitchen telling himself, out loud, that the achievement didn't fill what he thought it would fill.

The Audit

Working through the chapter's motivation framework, Jordan maps his last two years.

Regulatory style: He starts with the hardest question. What was the regulatory style underlying the initiative?

He traces it carefully. The initial decision to develop the proposal was, he believes, identified regulation — it was aligned with his values, specifically impact and intellectual freedom. He could endorse the rationale. But as the proposal developed into the Warren conflict and then into the senior leadership presentation, a second regulatory pattern emerged alongside the first: introjected regulation. The desire to prove capability. The fear of being exposed as not ready for the bigger role.

So the initiative was both genuinely valued and driven by a shame-avoidance system operating simultaneously. This explains, at least in part, why achieving it felt incomplete: the intrinsic dimension was satisfied (the work was genuinely important and he did it well), but the introjected dimension was not satisfied by the outcome (because the shame-avoidance system cannot be satisfied — there is always another threat on the horizon).

The need assessment: - Autonomy: High — he had genuine ownership of the initiative and designed the approach substantially himself - Competence: High by the end — the success validated real capability, and he developed real skills - Relatedness: The gap. He did the initiative largely in his own head, with Dev as a sounding board and his therapist as a processing support. He didn't build deep professional relationships in the process. Warren was resolved but not befriended. Sandra is supportive but not close. The work satisfied autonomy and competence without building the relatedness that would have made it more fully satisfying.

The hedonic treadmill: He identifies this pattern clearly in himself. He can trace it back to college — the feeling after finishing a difficult exam that was somehow both relief and anticlimax. The minor depression after receiving graduate school acceptances. The dissatisfaction that followed his first promotion.

He writes: The pattern is: anticipate, achieve, adapt, reset. Each reset requires a larger target to produce the same anticipatory excitement. This is not ambition. This is a machine.

The Strategic Director Question

Sandra puts the Strategic Director role formally on the table in February. She wants Jordan's answer by the end of March.

Jordan does something he has not done before: he works through the WOOP process with the role as the goal.

Wish: To accept the Strategic Director role and build the customer experience strategy.

Outcome: He imagines it — the larger team, the budget authority, the scope. He notices that the imagined outcome feels more like relief than pleasure. More like arriving at the next safe ledge than like doing something he wants.

Obstacle: He sits with this longer than usual. The primary internal obstacle is not lack of confidence. He believes he can do the role. The obstacle is: he is not sure he wants it for the right reasons, and he has not learned what he wanted to learn from this yet.

Plan: He doesn't write the if-then plan immediately. He writes: I need to understand what I actually want before I decide.

He takes the question to Dev on a Thursday evening.

The Conversation

"I think I should take it," Jordan says. "And I think I want to understand why before I do."

Dev looks at him. "That's new."

"What?"

"Normally you'd have already decided and be telling me the decision."

Jordan considers this. "I think the initiative taught me something about the difference between the thing I do and the thing I do it for. And I want to make sure I know the difference before I go to the next level."

Dev asks: "What would taking it be for?"

"Impact, potentially. Learning, definitely. And probably some fear of what it means if I decline."

"What does it mean if you decline?"

"That I'm choosing something smaller than I was capable of."

"Is that what it would mean?"

Jordan thinks. "No. It might mean I'm choosing something more specific than I was chasing."

Dev says: "That seems like a more accurate description."

Jordan ends up accepting the role. But the decision-making process is different from anything preceding it: he makes it from a place of understanding the regulatory quality of his motivation, identifying that identified and integrated regulation are genuinely present alongside the introjected, and deciding that the role is worth pursuing even with the complexity acknowledged.

He writes afterward: The initiative was something I did partly to prove something and partly because it genuinely mattered. The next thing is something I'm doing with more consciousness about the difference. Progress is not purity. Progress is the increased visibility into what's actually driving me.

Analysis Questions

Jordan identifies his initiative motivation as a combination of identified regulation (genuine values alignment) and introjected regulation (shame-avoidance, proving capability). The chapter suggests this combination explains why achievement felt incomplete. Why would satisfying the identified component without resolving the introjected component produce dissatisfaction?
Jordan's need assessment identifies relatedness as the gap — the initiative satisfied autonomy and competence but was done largely in isolation. How does SDT predict that this specific gap would affect both the experience of the work and the satisfaction derived from its completion?
Jordan's WOOP process produces an unusual result: the imagined outcome feels like "relief rather than pleasure." What does this distinction reveal about the regulatory quality of the goal? How is this consistent with the chapter's discussion of fear of failure vs. hope for success motivation?
Jordan decides to take the Strategic Director role after explicitly identifying the motivation mixture — identified regulation present, introjected regulation present, integrated regulation growing. The chapter argues that making decisions from identified regulation (genuine endorsement of the rationale) produces better outcomes than introjected compliance. What specifically is Jordan doing differently in this decision than he would have done two years earlier?
Jordan writes: "Progress is not purity. Progress is the increased visibility into what's actually driving me." How does this statement reflect the SDT framework's practical application? What specifically has become more visible, and why does visibility matter even when the introjected motivation is still present?