Jansen, Erik2019-08-262019-08-262019-08-262019-08-19http://hdl.handle.net/10012/14948A central challenge faced by leaders is effectively managing the motivation of others. Integrating past research on leadership, motivation, and regulatory focus theory, I propose that metamotivation—the process of monitoring and controlling motivational states during goal pursuit (Scholer, Miele, Murayama, & Fujita, 2018)—plays an important role in managing the motivation of others. Metamotivation research to date has focused on how people manage their own motivation, while past leadership and motivation research has tended to examine how leaders affect the motivation of followers in relatively passive ways, or the benefits and costs of leaders encouraging a single type of motivation across situations. Using a regulatory focus (Higgins, 1997) framework, I extend metamotivation beyond the context of the self and explore leaders’ metamotivational knowledge of how to flexibly manage the motivations of others. Four studies (N = 882) investigate whether leaders possess accurate metamotivational knowledge of how to actively and flexibly manage the motivation of followers in response to changing situational and task demands. Results revealed that leaders have accurate knowledge of how follower motivational orientations fit with different tasks (Study 1 and 2), and accurate knowledge of how to induce motivational states in followers in both a close-ended paradigm (Study 3) and an open-ended, spontaneous generation paradigm (Study 4). By highlighting the role of metamotivational knowledge in leadership, this research offers new insights into how people can more effectively manage the motivation of others.enmetamotivationleadershipregulatory focusmotivationMaster Thesis