Between support and effort: how managerial need support and employee need crafting longitudinally associate with employee basic psychological needs

Abstract Basic psychological needs have been demonstrated to be key drivers of employee work functioning. Studies investigating employees’ basic psychological need states in the workplace have focused on either the influence of contextual factors or the influence of employee crafting, yet there has not been any empirical investigation testing both types of factors simultaneously. Thus, the present study has compared the longitudinal associations from managerial need support and employee work-related need crafting to the satisfaction and frustration of employees’ basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We hypothesized that both managerial need support and employee work-related need crafting would be distinctly associated with improvements in employee need satisfaction and frustration. We tested three longitudinal models (one per need), with a timeframe of three measurements across four months. Longitudinal results showed that only managerial need support had a positive association with autonomy satisfaction and a negative association with autonomy frustration, alongside with only employee competence crafting having a positive association with competence satisfaction, and both managerial need support and employee relatedness crafting having positive associations with relatedness satisfaction and negative associations with relatedness frustration. These findings highlight the distinct relations, and the complementarity, between contextual and individual factors in supporting employee basic psychological needs.