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Need for achievement

Need for achievement (N-Ach) refers to an individual's desire for significant accomplishment, mastering of skills, control, or high standards. The term was first used by Henry Murray[1] and associated with a range of actions. Murray developed a theory of personality that was organized in terms of motives, presses, and needs. Murray described a need as a, “potentiality or readiness to respond in a certain way under certain given circumstances.” Theories of personality based upon needs and motives suggest that our personalities are a reflection of behaviors controlled by needs. While some needs are temporary and changing, other needs are more deeply seated in our nature. According to Murray, these psychogenic needs function mostly on the unconscious level, but play a major role in our personality. The concept of NAch was subsequently popularised by the psychologist David McClelland. The n-ach person is “achievement motivated” and therefore seeks achievement, attainment of realistic but challenging goals, and advancement in the job. There is a strong need for feedback as to achievement and progress, and a need for a sense of accomplishment.

This personality trait is characterized by an enduring and consistent concern with setting and meeting high standards of achievement. This need is influenced by internal drive for action (intrinsic motivation), and the pressure exerted by the expectations of others (extrinsic motivation). Most people possess and exhibit a combination of these characteristics. Some people exhibit a strong bias to a particular motivational need, and this motivational or needs mix consequently affects their behavior and working/managing style. Measured by thematic appreciation tests, need for achievement motivates an individual to succeed in competition, and to excel in activities important to him or her.[2]

Need for Achievement is related to the difficulty of tasks people choose to undertake. Those with low N-Ach may choose very easy tasks, in order to minimise risk of failure, or highly difficult tasks, such that a failure would not be embarrassing. Those with high N-Ach tend to choose moderately difficult tasks, feeling that they are challenging, but within reach. They seek to excel and thus tend to avoid both low-risk and high-risk situations. The reason for avoiding low-risk situations is because easily attained success is not genuine, and avoiding high-risk situations because they see the outcome as one of chance rather than one’s own effort.

People high in N-Ach are characterized by a tendency to seek challenges and a high degree of independence. People with a high need for achievement:desire success and positive feedback that is related to their performance on tasks, seek to excel and thus tend to avoid both low-risk and high-risk situations, and like to work alone or with other high achievers. Their most satisfying reward is the recognition of their achievements. Sources of high N-Ach include:

Parents who encouraged independence in childhood

Praise and rewards for success

Association of achievement with positive feelings

Association of achievement with one's own competence and effort, not luck

A desire to be effective or challenged

Interpersonal Strength

Desirability

Feasibility

Goal Setting Abilities

' Theory'

The pioneering research work of the Harvard Psychological Clinic in the 1930s, summarised in Explorations in Personality, provided the start point for future studies of personality, especially those relating to needs and motives. David C. McClelland's and his associates' investigations of achievement motivation have particular relevance to the emergence of leadership, and was interested in arousing a motive to achieve in an attempt to explain how people have different preferences for certain outcomes which is a problem for motivation. McClelland proposed that an individual’s specific needs are acquired over time and are shaped by one’s life experiences. In this connection, the need for achievement refers to an individual's preference for success under conditions of competition. The vehicle McClelland employed to establish the presence of an achievement motive was the type of fantasy a person expressed on the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), developed by Christiana Morgan and Henry Murray to explore the underlying dynamics of personality, such as internal conflicts, dominant drives, interests, and motives. Christiana Morgan and Henry Murray noted in Explorations in Personality that "...when a person interprets an ambiguous social situation he is apt to expose his own personality as much as the phenomenon to which he is attending... Each picture should suggest some critical situation and be effective in evoking a fantasy relating to it" (p531). The test presents the subject with a series of ambiguous pictures, and the subject is asked to develop a spontaneous story for each picture. The assumption is that the subject will project his or her own needs into the story. The Thematic Apperception Test determines the individual’s score for each of the needs of achievement, affiliation, and power. This score can be used to suggest the types of jobs for which the person might be well suited.The TAT has been widely used to support assessment of needs and motives.[3] According to McClelland, explicit nAch leads to conscious and volitional intent or goal setting. Motivation for goal achievement arises from a dispositional motive, and thus nAch could affect the use of self-leading strategies, such as goal setting, positively. NAch and self-leadership share conceptual similarities, similar phenotypical processes, and similar real-life outcomes.

In 1961 McClelland published The Achieving Society, which articulated his model of human motivation. McClelland is most noted for describing three types of motivational need, which he identified in his book, which are achievement motivation (n-ach), authority/power motivation (n-pow), and affiliation motivation (n-affil). McClelland believed that the relative importance of each need varies among individuals and cultures. Arguing that commonly used hiring tests using IQ and personality assessments were poor predictors of competency, McClelland proposed that companies should base hiring decisions on demonstrated competency in relevant fields, rather than on standardized test scores. Iconoclastic in their time, McClelland’s ideas have become standard practice in many corporations. [4] While some believe other psychometric questionnaires that offer better reliability and validity, the properly administered TAT meets 0.85 reliability standards, and is the only tool that has been found to measure implicit motivation with any degree of validity.

The procedure in McClelland's initial investigation was to arouse in the test audience a concern with their achievement. A control group was used in which arousal was omitted. In the course of this experiment, McClelland discovered through analyzing the stories on the TAT that initial arousal was not necessary. Instead, members of the control group — individuals who had had no prior arousal — demonstrated significant differences in their stories, some writing stories with a high achievement content and some submitting stories with a low achievement content. McClelland was not only an academician, interested in theories of what motivates people, he also applied his ideas to management in the corporate world. Forming McBer Consulting Company, in 1963, gave him opportunities to put his ideas into practice as well as a wealth of practical experience and data from which to further develop and refine his theories. Using results based on the Thematic Apperception Test, McClelland demonstrated that individuals in a society can be grouped into high achievers and low achievers based on their scores on what he called "N-Ach".[3] Disturbed by what he saw as the unjustified use of intelligence (IQ) tests for job selection, McClelland introduced the idea of competencies. A competency is defined as any characteristic of a person that differentiates performance in a specific job, role, culture, or organization. As he put it, "if you are hiring a ditchdigger, it doesn't matter if his IQ is 90 or 110—what matters is if he can use a shovel." After his first paper on this topic in 1973, this approach spread throughout industry and is now a generally accepted approach to measuring job requirements and evaluating job candidates, as it has been consistently shown to be the least biased form of job selection.

McClelland and his associates have since extended their work in fantasy analysis to include different age groups, occupational groups, and nationalities in their investigations of the strength of need for achievement. He researched extensively the role of the needs for achievement, power, and affiliation in occupational success, economic and political development, health, and personal adjustment. People with different needs are motivated differently. These investigations have indicated that the N-Ach score increases with a rise in occupational level. Invariably, businessmen, managers, and entrepreneurs are high scorers. Achievement motivation is positively related to the leadership of small task-oriented groups and small entrepreneurial firms and negatively related to the effectiveness of high- level managers in complex organizations or in political situations. In addition, other studies found that the high achievers, though identified as managers, businessmen, and entrepreneurs, are not gamblers. Highly achievement-motivated people should be given challenging projects with reachable but challenging goals and provided frequent feedback. While money is not an important motivator, it is an effective form of feedback if it is linked to clear measures of success. A high emotional intelligence calls for a high need for achievement while a low emotional intelligence calls for a lower need for achievement. They will accept risk only to the degree they believe their personal contributions will make a difference in the final outcome.[5]

Employees with a high affiliation need perform best in a cooperative environment, where they can belong to something larger than themselves. Meanwhile, McClelland believed that management should provide people with strong need for power the opportunity to manage others. An experiment realized to entry level managers of AT&T from 1956 to 1960, studied the level of achievement attained during a period of 8 to 16 years, showing that High n-Achievement was associated with managerial success at lower levels of management jobs, in which promotion depends more on individual contributions than it does at higher levels. At the higher levels, in which promotion depends on demonstrated ability to manage others, a high n-Achievement is not associated with success; by contrast, the leadership motive pattern is so associated, in all likelihood because it involves a high n-Power, emerging as a concern for influencing people. [6] A study in January 2011 investigated the links between need for achievement, burnout, and intention to leave one’s study program in undergraduate university students in order to assess the applicability of the occupational model of burnout to an educational context. A sample of 226 university students completed the personality research form need for achievement scale, the Maslach burnout inventory – student survey, and Weisberg’s intention to leave scale. Structural equation modeling indicated that need for achievement directly prevented each component of burnout (emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced efficacy). Moreover, emotional exhaustion directly promoted cynicism, which in turn directly promoted reduced efficacy. Finally, cynicism and reduced efficacy directly promoted intention to leave. The findings suggest that the characteristics, antecedents, and consequences of study-related burnout are similar to those of work-related burnout.

These explorations into the achievement motive seem to turn naturally into the investigation of national differences based on Max Weber's thesis that the industrialization and economic development of the Western nations were related to the Protestant ethic and its corresponding values supporting work and achievement. Motivation research has long considered human motives and needs. However, isolating people's motivational needs can be a difficult process because most people are not explicitly aware of what their motives are. McClelland and his associates have satisfied themselves that such a relationship, viewed historically through an index of national power consumption, indeed exists. Differences related to individual, as well as to national, accomplishments depend on the presence or absence of an achievement motive in addition to economic resources or the infusion of financial assistance. McClelland’s work with David Burnham, described in their article together in 1976, revealed that better managers tended to score high in their need for power, their need to influence other people, and that need outweighed their need to be liked. They also found that the most effective managers directed their desire for power toward the benefit of the organization as a whole. High achievers can be viewed as satisfying a need for self-actualization through accomplishments in their job assignments as a result of their particular knowledge, their particular experiences, and the particular environments in which they have lived.[7]

[edit] Measurement

The techniques McClelland and his collaborators developed to measure N-Ach, N-Affil and N-Pow (see McClelland et al., 1958) can be viewed as a radical break with the dominant psychometric tradition. The need for affiliation (n-Affil) is characterized by a desire to belong, an enjoyment of teamwork, a concern about interpersonal relationships, and a need to reduce uncertainty. The need for power (N-Pow) is characterized by a drive to control and influence others, a need to win arguments, a need to persuade and prevail. The presence of these motives or drives in an individual indicates a predisposition to behave in certain ways. However, it should be recognized that McClellend's thinking was strongly influenced by the pioneering work of Henry Murray, both in terms of Murray's model of human needs and motivational processes (1938) and his work with the OSS during World War Two. It was during this period that Murray introduced the idea of "situation tests" and multi-rater / multi-method assessments. It was Murray who first identified the significance of Need for Achievement, Power and Affiliation and placed these in the context of an integrated motivational model. Each need is important in and of itself, but Murray also believed that needs can be interrelated, can support other needs, and can conflict with other needs. For example, the need for dominance may conflict with the need for affiliation when overly controlling behavior drives away friends, family, and romantic partners. Murray also believed that environmental factors play a role in how these psychogenic needs are displayed in behavior.

Whilst trait-based personality theory assume that high-level competencies like initiative, creativity, and leadership can be assessed using “internally consistent” measures (see psychometrics), the McClelland measures recognize that such competencies are difficult and demanding activities which will neither be developed nor displayed unless people are undertaking activities they care about (i.e. are strongly motivated to undertake). McClelland's theory allows for the shaping of a person's needs, and training programs can be used to modify one's need profile. Further studies have indicated that motives cannot be decreased, but may be increased over significant time. A study by his associates Bradburn and Berlew (1961) supported McClelland's theory. They analyzed achievement motives in British school text books and showed a strong correlation between these themes, a generation later, with England's industrial growth. Furthermore, it is the cumulative number of independent, but cumulative and substitutable, components of competence they bring to bear while seeking to carry out these activities that will determine their success. Accordingly, the N-Ach, N-Aff and N-Pow scoring systems simply count how many components of competence people bring to bear whilst carrying out activities they have a strong personal inclination (or motivation) to undertake.

McClelland’s research led him to formulate psychological characteristics of persons with strong need for achievement. David McClelland proposed the Leader Motive Profile Theory (LMP theory) in which he argued that a high power motivation, greater than the affiliation motive, is predictive of leader effectiveness. According to McClelland and David Winter (Motivating Economic Achievement), the following features accompany high level of achievement motivation: - Moderate risk propensity; - Undertaking innovative and engaging tasks; - Internal locus of control and responsibility for own decisions and behaviors; - Need for precise goal setting. [8][9]

An important corollary is that there is no point in trying to assess people’s abilities without first finding out what they care about. According to a Washington Post article, the Virginia Board of Education reported an annual state-of-schools report which contains evidence that schools and students are achieving at impressive levels. Student achievements have made gains from scores of SAT and ACT exams, but there are achievement gaps between students of different ethnic, racial, and socio economic backgrounds. The report says, “This is not simply a matter of putting more money into our schools; rather it is a matter of carefully and thoughtfully focusing all available resources where they can be most successful.” So one cannot assess such things as “creativity” in any general sense, as some psychometricians do. One has always to ask “creativity in relation to what?” So McClelland’s measures, originally presented as means of assessing “personality”, are best understood as means of measuring competence in ways which break radically with traditional psychometric approaches. He was able to apply his theory of the importance of motivation and competency in the fields of management, economic and political development, individual health, personal adjustment, and occupational success. McClelland's recognition that competence, not intelligence, is key to job performance transformed the way employees are interviewed, hired, and promoted for all manner of positions and responsibilities. The training of competencies, identified for various tasks, has emerged as a major educational objective, complementing the goal of teaching knowledge, and understood as a trainable ability unlike intelligence. Everybody has different goals and needs for achievement based off many factors like past experiences, education, the risks, and the feedback they will receive.

McClelland's last paper, in 1998, was a study demonstrating that rigorous competency-based selection could predict performance in top executives in a multinational organization: His study found job performance (against business goals) could be predicted two years in advance with 75-85 percent accuracy—a validity coefficient estimated to be 0.81, and unmatched by any other tool. Since the technique is both labor-intensive and requires skilled assessors to execute at that level, it is often not used at entry-level through supervisory levels of organizations, though it is still effective.

The McBer Consulting Company, now a part of the Hay Institute, which McClelland founded has made great advances in aiding managers to train and evaluate employees, and continues to work in this area.

[edit] References

^ Murray, H. A. (1938), p164. Explorations in Personality. New York: Oxford University Press ^ http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/need-for-achievement.html#ixzz2DAbf1NPt ^ a b David C. McClelland, "Methods of Measuring Human Motivation", in John W. Atkinson, ed., Motives in Fantasy, Action and Society (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nos-trand, 1958), pp. 12–13. ^ http://www.isites.harvard.edu/ ^ David C. McClelland, "Methods of Measuring Human Motivation", in John W. Atkinson, ed.,The Achieving Society (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1961), pp. 41–43. ^ McClellan David, et al. “Leadership Motive Pattern and Long-Term Success in Management” Journal of Applied Psychology 1982, Vol. 67, No. 6, 737-743; Copyright 1982 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0021-9010/82/6706-0737S00.75 ^ David C. McClelland, "Achievement Motivation Can Be Developed," Harvard Business Review 43 (November–December 1965), pp. 68. ^ McClelland, D.C. (1958). Methods of Measuring Human Motivation. ^ David C. McClelland and David G. Winter. Motivating Economic Achievement. New York: Free Press, 1969. [edit]Further reading

Lenk, H (1979). Social Philosophy of Athletics: A Pluralistic and Practice-Oriented Philosophical Analysis of Top Level Amateur Sport. Stipes Pub Llc. McClelland, D. C., Atkinson, J. W., Clark, R. A., & Lowell, E. L. (1958). A scoring manual for the achievement motive; R. W. Heyns, J. Veroff, & J. W. Atkinson, A scoring manual for the affiliation motive; J. Veroff, A scoring manual for the power motive. Respectively, Chapters 12, 13 and 14 in J. W. Atkinson (Ed.), Motives in Fantasy, Action and Society. New York: Van Nostrand. Raven, J. (2001). The McClelland/McBer Competency Models. Chapter 15 in J. Raven & J. Stephenson (Eds.), Competence in the Learning Society. New York: Peter Lang. Breidebach, G. (2012). Bildungsbenachteiligung. Warum die einen nicht können und die anderen nicht wollen. Hamburg: Dr Kovac Verlag. [edit]