Abstract The present paper reports three studies that were based on the general proposition effectiveness of transformational leadership (TL) depends whether displayed TL behaviors match followers’ motives. Specifically, inspirational motivation should be effective with followers high power motive, intellectual stimulation achievement and individual consideration affiliation motive. In study 1,...

Grothendieck introduced the notion of a “motif” in a letter to Serre in 1964. Later he wrote that, among the objects he had been privileged to discover, they were the most charged with mystery and formed perhaps the most powerful instrument of discovery.1 In this talk, I shall explain what motives are, and why Grothendieck valued them so highly. These are my notes for a “popular” talk in the ‘W...

We use the term Quixoteism to refer to a new social motive. The characterization of this motive deals with two aspects: the definition of the ultimate goal (i.e., to increase the welfare of the world) and the proposal of a process that activates it (i.e., a transcendental-change orientation). Three studies were conducted to test this characterization. In Study 1 we developed an empirical measur...

Four studies explored whether perspective-taking and empathy would be differentially effective in mixed-motive competitions depending on whether the critical skills for success were more cognitively or emotionally based. Study 1 demonstrated that individual differences in perspective-taking, but not empathy, predicted increased distributive and integrative performance in a multiple-round war ga...

A system for automatic motive identification of large folksong corpora is described in this article. The method is based on a dynamic time warping algorithm determining inherent repeating elements of the melodies and a self-organizing map that learns the most typical motive contours. Using this system, the typical motive collections of 22 cultures in Eurasia have been determined, and another gr...