Background of David McClelland
David Clarence McClelland (May 20, 1917 – March 27, 1998) was an American
psychologist,
noted for his work on motivation Need Theory.
He published a number of works during the 1950s and the 1990s and developed new
scoring systems for the Thematic
Apperception Test (TAT) and its descendants.] McClelland is credited with developing
the Achievement Motivation Theory commonly referred to as need achievement or n-achievement
theory. A Review of General Psychology
survey, published in 2002, ranked McClelland as the 15th most cited psychologist
of the 20th century.
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Contents
Life
and career
McClelland, born in Mt. Vernon, New York, was awarded a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University in 1938, an MA
from the University of Missouri in 1939,[1]
and a PhD in experimental psychology from Yale University
in 1941. He taught at Connecticut College and Wesleyan University before joining the faculty at Harvard University in 1956, where he worked for 30 years, serving as chairman
of the Department of Psychology and Social Relations. In 1987,[4]
he moved to Boston University, where he was awarded the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions.[citation needed]
The major themes of David
McClelland’s work were on personality and the application of that knowledge to
helping people make their lives better. One theme was the development of the
expectancy-value theory of human motivation. A second theme was the development
of tests and operant methods, such as the Thematic Apperception Test,
Behavioral Event Interview, and the Test of Thematic Analysis. A third theme
was the development of job-competency studies, and a fourth theme was the
application of this research to helping people and their social systems,
whether that was through motivation and competency development, organization
and community development, and changing behavior to battle stress and
addiction. David McClelland believed in applying the results from the research
and testing to see if they helped people. He was instrumental in starting 14
research and consulting companies, the largest was McBer and Company
(1965-1989), which later was sold to Yankelovich, Skelly & White in 1983
and even later to Saatchi and Saatchi (1985). The Hay Group, also purchased by
Saatchi and Saatchi, and McBer bought themselves back from S&S in 1989 and
operated as the worldwide consultancy called The Hay Group until they were
acquired by Korn Ferry in 2016.
Expectancy Value Theory of
Motivation
McClelland claimed that motivation
is “a recurrent concern for a goal state or condition as measured in fantasy,
which drives, directs and selects the behavior of the individual” (McClelland,
1985). Basing his work on the work of Henry Murray,
he focused on three particular motives: the Need for Achievement (N Ach); the
Need for Affiliation (N Aff); and the Need for Power (N Pow). N Ach is the
desire to excel in relation to a set of standards. It is the drive to succeed.
N Pow is the desire to be influential and have an impact on an organization. N
Aff is the desire for close personal relationships.[5]
McClelland’s three needs, are non-sequential, but instead are used in relation
to each other.
“According to his theory, most
people possess and portray a mixture of these needs: those with a high need for
achievement have an attraction to situations offering personal accountability;
individuals with a dominating need for authority and power have a desire to
influence and to increase personal status and prestige; and finally, those with
a great need for affiliation value building strong relationships and belonging
to groups or organizations.”[6]
The work in the 1940s through the
late 1960s focused on the Achievement Motive and its impact on development of
economies and entrepreneurship (McClelland and Winter, 1969; Miron and
McClelland, 1979). He shifted his work in the 1960s to focus on the power
motive, first addressing issues of addiction and alcoholism (McClelland, Davis,
Kalin and Wanner, 1972), then to leadership effectiveness (McClelland and
Boyatzis, 1982; McClelland and Burnham, 1976), and later to community
development (McClelland, Rhinesmith and Kristensen, 1975). The work on
leadership and management helped to create a behavioral level of a person’s capability,
which McClelland called “competencies (McClelland, 1973; McClelland, 1998;
Boyatzis, 1982; Spencer and Spencer, 1993; Goleman, 1998). This work was one of
the foundational works helping to create the competency movement in human
resources. He also led efforts to show how important competencies were relative
to knowledge and traditional personality traits in the desired outcomes of
higher education (Winter, McClelland and Stewart, 1981). His work on power
extended into research on the body’s natural healing process (McClelland,
1979).
In an exception from the typical
focus of a psychologist, McClelland also examined cultural and country-wide
effects of motives and related them to large scale trends in society, such as
economic development, job creation, the provocation of wars and health.
McClelland’s work on motivation was cited as the most useful approach to
motivation in a study by the former accounting firm Touche Ross & Company
(Miller, 1981).
In Search of Operant Tests and
Measures
David McClelland argued that operant
methods (i.e., tests where a person must generate thoughts or actions) were
much more valid predictors of behavioral outcomes, job performance, life
satisfaction and other similar outcomes. Specifically, he claimed that operant
methods had greater validity and sensitivity than respondent measures (i.e.,
tests calling for a true/false, rating or ranking response). He fought against
more traditional psychologists insisting on using self-assessment, respondent
measures and avoiding operant measures because, in traditional views, operant
measures suffered from less traditional measures of reliability. McClelland
believed that better operant measures were possible with the use of reliable
codes for processing the information in them (Smith, Atkinson, McClelland and
Veroff, 1992; Boyatzis, 1998; Winter and McClelland, 1978). He claimed his life
long quest was to instill in psychological researchers a value of extracting
people’s actual thought (i.e., conscious and unconscious) along with their
behavior. He was repeatedly publishing research and encouraging his doctoral
students and colleagues to show that operant methods, as compared to respondent
methods, consistently show: (a) more criterion validity; (b) increased
insightfulness despite less test-retest reliability; (c) greater sensitivity in
discriminating mood and such differences; (d) more uniqueness and less
likelihood of suffering from multicollinearity; (e) greater cross-cultural
validity, because they did not require a person to respond to prepared items;
and (f) increased utility in applications to human or organizational
development (McClelland, 1985).
Job Competencies
McClelland et al (1958)
conceptualized a broad array of capabilities. Reviving his earlier personality
theory (McClelland, 1951), McClelland and his colleagues at McBer and Company
intensified competency research on management, leadership and professional jobs
in the early 1970s (i.e., skills, self-image, traits, and motives, see
Boyatzis, 1982; Spencer and Spencer, 1993; Goleman, 1998). The definition of a
job competency required that the person’s intent be understood, not merely that
the person’s behavior be observed. They used operant methods like audiotaped
Critical Incident Interviews, which they called Behavioral event Interviews,
and videotaped simulations with inductive research designs comparing effective
with ineffective or even less effective performers. This approach was focused
on the “person,” rather than the tasks or job.
The research results developed a picture
of how a superior performer in a job thinks, feels, and acts in his/her work
setting. This became a model for how to help anyone in a job, or aspiring to
one, develop their capability. It became, over the coming decades, the norm for
training design, selection and promotion practices, career development and even
higher education in developing people for such jobs.
Helping People Change
David McClelland believed that if
you know how an outstanding performer thinks and acts, you could teach people
how to think and act that way. The early projects addressed entrepreneurial
development and training in achievement thinking and behavior for small
business owners in India, Tunisia, Iran, Poland, Malawi and the US.
“Understanding human motivation
ought to be a good thing. It should help us to find out what we really want so
that we can avoid chasing rainbows that are not for us. It should open up
opportunities for self-development if we apply motivational principles to
pursuing our goals in life”.
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