Leadership Scholar Digest

David McClelland is a world renowned academic, scholar, and author of psychological behavior and motivation theory with over a dozen books and articles to his credit. This essay will make no attempt at enumerating or discussing all of Dr. McClelland’s contributions to the scientific community; rather my intent is to present a critique of his conceptualization of leadership, outline his theoretical grounding, and discuss the key features of his theories.
Contributions
McClelland’s contributions to leadership are centered on human motivation and how these motivations affect people in the managerial context. In 1961, he published “The Achieving Society” in which he identified three motivators that were common to everyone in varying degrees: 1) Achievement 2) Power 3) Affiliation (McClelland, 1977)
According to McClelland, each of these motivators exists to varying degrees in each of us, and are learned, or socially developed. Individual action is to a significant degree driven by the combination of these attributes. In “The Achieve Society”, McClelland point out that in most cases people aren’t normally aware of what drives them, despite the fact that the combination of these motivators significantly impacts how they work with others and the types of roles that best suites them (McClelland, 1961).

Achievement Achievement oriented people are driven to master complex challenges, to overcome goals, find solutions, and they enjoy positive feedback on their success. They are also highly motivated by standards of excellence, well-defined objectives, and clear roles. High achievement oriented people tend to set challenging goals for themselves and are more apt to take calculated risks for achieving these goals. They tend to thrive in leading task-oriented groups and in entrepreneurial roles. They live to achieve, and to quantify their achievements (Leverington, 2014).
Power
Power oriented individuals seek to control and influence, they love to persuade and prevail and need to win arguments. Not surprisingly, executive roles tend to rate high in power oriented individuals. According to McClelland, when the power motivator surpasses the achievement it is an excellent predictor of leadership effectiveness (1961). The desire to influence usually focuses power oriented people on leadership. However, this motivator also have the potential for negative consequences for the organization if not properly constrained. This phenomenon is best described in “Power: The Inner Experience”:
“How much initiative he should take, how persuasive he should attempt to be, and at what point his clear enthusiasm for certain goals becomes personal authoritarian insistence that those goals are the right ones whether the members of the group may think, are all questions calculated to frustrate the well-intentioned leader. If he takes no initiative, he is no leader. If he takes too much, he becomes a dictator, particularly if he tries to curtail the process by which members of the group participate in shaping group goals. There is a particular danger for a man who has demonstrated his competence in shaping group goals and in inspiring group members to pursue them” (McClelland, 1975).
Affiliation
Affiliation orientation is marked by a strong desire to belong. These individuals tend to have a passionate concern for associations, they endeavor to decrease ambiguity, and they love collaboration. They are also known to be submissive, less self-confident, are usually more reliant on others. As leaders, affiliation oriented people are motivated by what can be accomplish with people they know and trust (Leverington, 2014).
Applications
Dr. McClelland went on to discuss both methods of measuring the prevalence of these three motivators as well as outlining the various patterns or results and their relationship to effective managerial behavior. He utilized a variation of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) to gauge individual acumen that we based on a content code for stories written to pictures. Rarely used in a business setting, the test presents a series of pictures to the subject, who is then asked to develop a story based on them. The assumption is that the stories will be a projection of the subject's underlying abilities and motivations. According to him, particular motive patterns, which he called empire-building or leadership motive, resulted in people being more effective managers than those with different patterns. He defined the patterns as being at least moderately high in n-Power, lower (at least) in n-Affiliation, and high in self-control.
According to McClelland, top management positions should have a high need for power and a low need for affiliation, and that individuals with a high marks in achievement are more likely to succeed when paired with projects with achievable goals and that individuals with a lower need for achievement are not normally suited for top management positions. He also believes that people with a high need for affiliation may not be good top managers but will be team players and are best suited for a cooperative work environment (NetMBA, 2013).
Theoretical Grounding McClelland’s theories on motivation and psychology of power are largely attributed to his Quake upbringing. Much of the research used to support his theories, such as the work of M.R. Winterbottom’s principles of raising boys who turn out to have a high n-Achievement measure are closely related to the Quaker/Puritan structure. In this environment, children were brought up with a high emphasis on early self-reliance and mastery (Hoselitz, 1962). Perhaps it was this early exposure to the n-Achievement blueprint that shape much of his ideas on motivation and power.
Limitations
The limitations of the needs theory can mostly be attributed to finite measures of the three motivators and Dr. McClelland’s interpretation of those results. Many of the theory’s critics point out the varied results discovered by researchers attempting to validate McClelland’s findings. Researchers report that superiority in non-achievement motives have compensated for the inferiority in achievement motivation; in some cases results show even higher performance among low n-Achievement than high achievers (Nygard, 1975).
Since the publication of his early works linking high n-Achievement and economic prosperity, there have been numerous attempts to subject his hypothesis to further tests. Many studies have re- inspected his hypothesis using more sophisticated measures of economic growth, principally in the period since 1950. While the economic growth indicators in these studies have become much more sophisticated, the indices of nAch that McClelland derived from his 40-nation sample of the 1950s have not been overhauled in any way. The results of these subsequent studies have been at best ambiguous, showing either a much weaker effect (Tekiner, 1980), or none at all (compare Finison, 1976; Mazur and Rosa, 1977).
Conclusion
McClelland's ideas revolutionized business recruitment, and although his intensive methods of assessing job applicants have lost some of their popularity, the basic principles endure. Motivation is now seen as critical to performance at work. Reference
Finison, L. (1976). The application of McClelland's national development model to recent data. Journal of Social Psychology, ISSN 0022-4545, 1976, Volume 98, Issue 1, pp. 55 – 59.
Hoselitz, B. (1962). The Achieving Society. By DAVID MCCLELLAND. Princeton, N.J. American Journal of Sociology. Jul1962, Vol. 68 Issue 1, p129-130. 2p.
Leverington, K. (2014). McClelland’s Achievement Motivation Theory. Retrieved from http://blog.kirkleverington.com/?p=753
Mazur, A., & Rosa, E. (1971). An Empirical Test of McClelland's 'Achieving Society' Theory. Social Forces, 55(3), 769-774.
McClelland, D. (1961). The Achieving Society. 2010 Reprint of 1961 edition. David C. McClelland. Martino Fine Books. NY, 2010.
McClelland, D. (1975). Power: The inner experience. New York: Irvington.
NetMBA.com (2013). McClelland - Theory of Needs. Retrieved from. www.netmba.com/mgmt/ob/motivation/mcclelland
Nygard, R. (1975). A Reconsideration of the Achievement-Motivation Theory. European Journal of Social Psychology, ISSN 0046-2772, 1975, Volume 5, Issue 1, pp. 61 – 92.
Tekiner, A. Need Achievement and International Differences in Income Growth: 1950-1960. Economic Development and Cultural Change, ISSN 0013-0079, 01/1980, Volume 28, Issue 2, pp. 293 – 320.