Satisfying Basic Psychological Needs to Foster Academic Staff Creativity and Performance under Technological Turbulence:
A Conceptual Paper for Malaysian Comprehensive Universities
Keywords:
basic psychological needs, Self-Determination Theory, individual creativity, Componential Theory of Creativity, academic staff performance, task performance, contextual performance, technological turbulanceAbstract
This conceptual paper develops an integrated framework explaining how the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—enhances academic staff performance through individual creativity in Malaysian comprehensive universities, while considering technological turbulence as a boundary condition. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), the Componential Theory of Creativity, and job performance literature, the framework theorises how basic psychological need satisfaction influences creativity and, subsequently, task and contextual performance. The paper proposes that autonomy, competence, and relatedness need satisfaction foster three creativity components: domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant processes, and intrinsic task motivation. These components are expected to enhance task performance, including teaching quality, timely assessment, research productivity, and grant-related outputs, as well as contextual performance, such as mentoring, collegial support, knowledge sharing, and proactive service. Individual creativity is theorised to mediate the relationship between basic psychological need satisfaction and academic staff performance. Technological turbulence, reflected in rapid changes in digital platforms, analytics tools, artificial intelligence applications, and online learning requirements, is proposed as a boundary condition that may strengthen or weaken the motivation–creativity–performance relationships. Intrinsic task motivation and adaptive creativity-relevant processes may become increasingly important for maintaining performance in digitally transforming universities.
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