David McClelland

David McClelland

David Clarence McClelland (1917 – March 27, 1998) was an American personality and social psychologist, and an advocate of quantitative history. He is known for his work in the field of motivation and especially in the area of the need for achievement.

He has developed innovative ways of measuring psychological characteristics, and he explored the role of achievement and power in personality, social history, and psychophysiology.

Life

David McClelland was born in 1917.

David McClelland earned his BA in 1938 at Wesleyan University, his MA in 1939 at the University of Missouri, and his Ph.D. in experimental psychology at Yale University in 1941.

After serving as an instructor at the Wesleyan from 1941 to 1946, McClelland left for Harvard, where he was emeritus professor in the department of psychology.

For his accomplishments, he received a number of honorary degrees.

McClelland taught at the Connecticut College and Wesleyan University before accepting, in 1956, a position at Harvard University. After his 30-year tenure at Harvard he moved, in 1987, to Boston University, where he was a Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology until his death at the age of 80.

Work

The acquired-needs theory developed by David McClelland is called McLellend's Theory of Needs. In this motivation theory, which draws on Murray's model, David McClelland proposes that an individual's specific needs are acquired over time and are shaped by one's early life experiences. Most of these needs can be classed as either achievement, affiliation, or power. A person's motivation and effectiveness in certain job functions are influenced by these three needs. McClelland's theory sometimes is referred to as the three need theory or as the learned needs theory. Later work indicated that motives are actually quite stable over long periods of time.

Conceiving an early interest in social motivation, McClelland developed a method of measuring human needs through content analysis of imaginative thought. He researched extensively the role of the needs for achievement, power, and affiliation in occupational success, economic and political development, health, and personal adjustment.

Achievement

People with a high need for achievement nAch seek to excel and thus tend to avoid both low-risk and high-risk situations. Predominantly Achievement-motivated individuals avoid low-risk situations because the easily attained success is not a genuine achievement. In high-risk projects, the Achievement-motivated see the outcome as one of chance rather than one's own effort. High nAch individuals prefer work that has a moderate probability of success, ideally a 50% chance. Achievement-motivated individuals need regular feedback in order to monitor the progress of their achievements. They prefer either to work alone or with others like themselves.

Affiliation

Those with a high need for affiliation nAffil need harmonious relationships with other people and need to feel accepted by other people. They tend to conform to the norms of their work group. High nAff individuals prefer work that provides significant personal interaction. They enjoy being part of groups and when not anxious make excellent team members, though sometimes are distractible into social interaction. They can perform well in customer service and client interaction situations.

Power

A person's need for power nPow can be one of two types - personal and institutional. Those who need personal power want to direct others, and this need often is perceived as undesirable. Persons who need institutional power (also known as social power) want to organize the efforts of others to further the goals of the organization. Managers with a high need for institutional power tend to be more effective than those with a high need for personal power. Work by Abigail Stewart indicated that this motive can interact with emotional maturity; at Stage I, one feels powerful by being associated with the powerful, whereas at Stage IV one sees oneself as a channel to empower others.

Implications of McClelland's Theory of Needs for Management

People with different needs are motivated differently. While all people have all three motives, they have them to different degrees. In practice, the majority of people have one motive to significantly higher degree, though a few have all three high.

• High need for achievement - Highly achievement-motivated people should be given challenging projects with reachable but challenging goals. They should be 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

• High need for affiliation - Employees with a high affiliation need perform best in a cooperative environment, where they can belong to something larger than themselves

• High need for power - Management should provide people with strong need to influence the opportunity to manage others.

Note that McClelland's theory allows for the shaping of a person's needs; training programs can be used to modify one's need profile. Studies have indicated that motives cannot be decreased, but may be increased over significant time.

David McClelland, disturbed by what he saw as the unjustified use of intelligence (IQ) tests for job selection, 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, it 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. See also Emotional Intelligence, a concept proposed by Daniel Goleman, a student of McClelland.

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 you could predict the job performance (against business goals) two years in advance with 75-85% 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.

Thematic Apperception Test

McClelland used the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), also called the Picture-Story Exercise (PSE) to measure the individual needs of different people. The TAT is a projective test that 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 and these will reflect certain underlying themes.

Psychologists have developed reliable scoring techniques for the Thematic Apperception Test. The 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. While some believe other psychometric questionnaires that offer better reliability and validity, the properly administered PSE meets 0.85 reliability standards, and is the only tool to measure implicit motivation with any degree of validity. In a seminal longitudinal study at AT&T, McClelland found that of all the tools used to predict how far people were promoted in 8-12 years, only motivation predicted at all, and it predicted with 67% accuracy, an extraordinary result over that period of time. No other measures, including personality and IQ, predicted to that level of significance, or indeed at all in most cases. This study was repeated 20 years later by Ruth Jacobs, with identical results for men and women.

Legacy

McClelland proposed a content theory of motivation based on Henry Murray's (1938) theory of personality, which sets out a comprehensive model of human needs and motivational processes. In McClelland's book The achieving society (1961) he asserts that human motivation comprises three dominant needs: the need for achievement (N-Ach), the need for power (N-Pow) and the need for affiliation (N-Affil). The subjective importance of each need varies from individual to individual and depends also on an individual's cultural background. He also claimed that this motivational complex is an important factor in the social change and evolution of societies. His legacy includes the scoring system which he co-developed for the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) that was developed by Murray and Morgan, in 1935. The TAT is used for personality assessment and in achievement motivation research, and described in McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, & Lowell's (1953) book The achievement motive.

McClelland's theory was an attempt to scientifically test Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. One of the key studies, confirming the validity of McClelland's theories, is the study of Bradburn and Berlew (1961) who analyzed achievement motives in British school readers ("text books") and showed a strong correlation of these themes, a generation later, with the Britain's industrial growth. The conclusion is that the imagery (i.e. the values) produce the result (economic achievement).

David McClelland's published works

• McClelland, D. C. (1961) The achieving society. Princeton: Van Nostrand.
• McClelland, D. C. (1973) "Testing for Competence rather than Intelligence." American Psychologist, 28, 1.
• McClelland, D. C. (1975) Power: the inner experience. New York: Halstead.
• McClelland, D. C. (1998) "Identifying competencies with behavioral-event interviews" Psychological Science, 9, No. 5.
• McClelland, D.C., Atkinson, J.W., Clark, R.A., & Lowell, E.L. (1953) The achievement motive. Princeton: Van Nostrand.
• McClelland, D. C., & Burnham, D. H. (2002/1968) "Power is the great motivator" Harvard Business Review
• McClelland, D. C., Koestner, R. & Weinberger, J. (1989). How do self-attributed and implicit motives differ? Psychological Review, 96, 690-702.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Atkinson, J.W. (Ed) (1958) Motives in fantasy, action, and society. Princeton: Van Nostrand.

• Bradburn, N.M., & Berlew, D.G. (1961) Need for achievement and English industrial growth. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 10, 8-20.

• Kelner, S.P., Jr. (1991) "Interpersonal motivation: cynical, positive, and anxious." Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston University.

• Murray, H.A. (1943) Thematic apperception test. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

• Murray, H.A. (1938) Explorations in personality. New York: Oxford University Press.

• Pettijohn, T. F. (1998) Psychology: A ConnecText, 4/e McGraw Hill ISBN 0-07-292904-9

External links

• Quantitative history. Retrieved May 21, 2008.
• McClelland's Theory of Needs

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