Dynamics of Psychological Goals: A Self-Organization Theory of Motivation and Personality

Although psychologists have developed many theories to understand human psychology, their underlying logic is still problematic and deviates from reality, leading to limited ability to explain and predict human behavior. This book builds a self-organization model of human psychology and elaborates its core concept, psychological goals, as the key to understand human motivation and personality. Based on this psychological model, it puts forward a set of theories including the self-organizing goal theory of motivation, structural goal change as a perspective on emotion, the goal-system theory of personality, and the Goal-Driven People hypothesis. Research shows that this new theoretical system enjoys an apparent advantage over scattered small-scale theories in interpreting and predicting human motivation, emotions, personalities, human nature, cognition, suicide, and other psychological phenomena. This book further explores the applications of the psychological goal theory in leadership research and indicates new directions for leadership theory.