David McClelland’s theory of motivations It is one of the best-known psychological models of human needs, especially in the field of business and organizations.
In this article we will analyze McClelland’s theory of three needs and the most significant antecedents for its emergence. We will focus mainly on detailing his contributions on the three types of motivation: affiliation, achievement and power
In the year 1943 American psychologist Abraham Maslow published in the magazine Psychological Review an article in which he presented his hierarchical theory of needs. This model, popularly known as “Maslow’s pyramid”, constituted a fundamental milestone in the evolution of the psychology of motivation.
Maslow defined five categories of needs; From most to least basic, these are the physiological needs (nutrition, sleep, sex, etc.), security (housing, employment, health), love and belonging (friendship, sexual intimacy), recognition (self-confidence, professional success) and self-realization (creativity, spontaneity, morality).
In the years that followed the popularization of Maslow’s model, many similar approaches appeared, such as McClelland’s theory of three needs, which we will describe below. Many of these models They are framed in humanistic psychology, which claimed the tendency toward personal growth of human beings.
Motivation has been a topic little studied by behaviorism and the orientations that followed it, since they focus on observable behavior; From this perspective, motivation is most commonly conceptualized as the incentive value given to reinforcement, although sometimes ambiguous concepts such as “drive” are included.
At the beginning of the sixties, David McClelland described in his book The Achieving Society (“The Realizing Society”) his theory of the three needs. In it he defines three types of motivations shared by all people, regardless of their culture, their sex and any other variable, although these can influence the preponderance of one or another need.
According to this author, motivations must be understood as unconscious processes, in a similar way to psychoanalytic approaches. That is why McClelland recommends the use of Henry A. Murray’s thematic apperception test which belongs to the category of projective psychological evaluation tests, in order to assess needs.
1. Need for affiliation
People with high affiliation motivation have strong desires to belong to social groups. They also seek to please others, so they tend to accept the opinions and preferences of others. They prefer collaboration to competition and they are uncomfortable with situations that involve risks and lack of certainty.
According to McClelland, these people tend to be better as employees than as leaders because they have greater difficulty giving orders or prioritizing organizational objectives. However, it is worth mentioning that they have been described two types of leaders: the task leader, associated with high productivity, and the socio-emotional leader specialist in maintaining group motivation.
The importance of the need for affiliation had already been previously highlighted by Henry Murray, creator of the thematic apperception test. The same can be said of the needs for achievement and power, which served as the basis for McClelland’s proposal.
Those who score high on the need for achievement feel intense drives to achieve. Goals that involve a high level of challenge, and they are not opposed to taking risks to achieve it, as long as it is calculated. In general, they prefer to work alone than in the company of other people and they like to receive feedback on the tasks they perform.
McClelland and other authors affirm that the need for achievement is influenced by personal abilities to set goals, by the presence of an internal locus of control (perception of self-responsibility for life events) and by the promotion of independence by the parents during childhood.
3. Need for power
Unlike more affiliative people, those in whom power motivation predominates enjoy competing with others – in order to win, of course. Those who have a high need for power highly value social recognition and They seek to control other people and influence their behavior often for selfish reasons.
McClelland distinguishes two types of need for power: socialized power and personal power. People who are closer to the first type tend to care more about others, while those who have a high personal power motivation want above all to obtain power for their own benefit.
People with a high power motivation who do not simultaneously have a high level of personal responsibility have a greater probability of carrying out externalizing psychopathological behaviors such as physical attacks and excessive substance use.
