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Doing Well vs. Doing Better: Preliminary Evidence for the Differentiation of the “Static” and “Incremental” Aspects of the Need for Competence

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Abstract

According to self-determination theory, competence is a basic psychological need that contributes to optimal human functioning and happiness. Classic theories of competence suggest that essential to the conceptualization of competence is the perception of not only “doing well” but also “doing better”, that is, experiencing a sense of stretching one’s limits, gaining new skills and abilities, and improving one’s effectance while interacting with the environment. However, the “doing better” aspect has largely been neglected or undifferentiated from the “doing well” aspect. The goal of the current research is to demonstrate that the “doing better” aspect can be differentiated from the “doing well” aspect. Two sub-studies using American and Chinese samples show preliminary support for the psychometric differentiation (using multidimensional scaling) between these two aspects, and both studies provide consistent support for differential predictive effects of the two aspects on motivation, well-being and growth outcomes. Unexpected findings such as the unique effect of frustrated incremental competence on amotivation are also reported.

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Notes

  1. In case the reader wonders whether psychological growth and incremental competence are the same phenomenon, the difference is as follows. Even though incremental competence could be viewed as growth in competence, growth might be about all areas of life and does not necessarily have to do with competence. For example, growth could be about relationships. Over the years, individuals could gradually become acquainted with more people and build a more elaborate social network, even if there is no explicit role of competence or increments of it. In some cases, psychological growth might even accompany negative incremental competence: even if an elderly scholar experiences a decline in cognitive ability, she or he might still continually experience psychological growth because of thinking and writing over time. In short, we predict incremental competence to be more closely related to growth because it constitutes a form of growth but is still not the same as psychological growth.

  2. One natural concern related to our analytical approach is that it may be best to run regression models that include the four subtypes of competence (crossed by satisfaction vs. frustration and incremental vs. static) simultaneously as predictors. However, an inspection of such models showed that the multicollinearity becomes too high, causing the results to become uninterpretable. For example, while external motivation is obviously significantly correlated with competence (e.g., see Table S2), in the multiple regression that includes all four predictors, none of the coefficients shows a significant partial effect. Various suppression effects (e.g., Maassen & Bakker, 2001) are also observed such that the coefficients of certain competences on certain positive outcomes are negative. Therefore, our regression analyses included only two predictors at a time.

  3. Although interaction between incremental and static aspects is not among our hypotheses, we conducted exploratory post hoc analyses to test them. After applying Bonferroni-corrected p values, none of the interactions is significant in either study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Shenzhen, China

    Shi Yu

  2. Shanghai Polytechnic University, Shanghai, China

    Fengjiao Zhang

  3. Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA

    Ludmila D. Nunes & Chantal Levesque-Bristol

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  1. Shi Yu
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  2. Fengjiao Zhang
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  3. Ludmila D. Nunes
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  4. Chantal Levesque-Bristol
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Correspondence to Shi Yu.

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Yu, S., Zhang, F., Nunes, L.D. et al. Doing Well vs. Doing Better: Preliminary Evidence for the Differentiation of the “Static” and “Incremental” Aspects of the Need for Competence. J Happiness Stud 23, 1121–1141 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-021-00442-w

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