The Lost Arc: Autonomy, Relatedness, Competence, and the Conditions Under Which People Grow

By Justin Ryan Carver

Why do some leaders make people more, while others make them less?

Justin Ryan Carver has worked for both kinds - leaders whose presence expanded what he thought he could do, and leaders whose influence slowly constricted his confidence until he could barely remember what it felt like to think freely. The distance between those two experiences, he came to believe, isn't explained by intelligence or rank. It's explained by three psychological needs that most leaders have never been taught to recognize: autonomy, relatedness, and competence. When these needs are supported, people produce, create, connect, and persist. When they are frustrated, people disengage, withdraw, burn out, or leave.

The Lost ARC is a synthesis built from borrowed parts, honestly named. It draws on five decades of research by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan on Self-Determination Theory, the motivational hierarchy descended from Maslow, the trust literature of Mayer, Edmondson, and Zak, and the emerging research on destructive leadership. What Carver contributes is the integration - a single diagnostic system aimed at working leaders that asks three questions of every person they lead: Where are they on the motivational hierarchy? Which of their psychological needs is most supported or most frustrated? What is the trust climate they are operating in, and is my behavior activating their development or inhibiting it?

This is not a book of quick fixes or proprietary acronyms. It is a book for the leader who lies awake wondering whether their team is thriving or merely surviving. For the new supervisor who inherited a broken team. For the experienced executive who has gotten results but suspects, in honest moments, that those results came at a human cost they have not fully reckoned with.

The people you lead will become more, or less, because of you. This book is about which.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H5Q24C1S
• ISBN13: 9798258654434
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"