David McClelland's theory of motivations

David McClelland's theory of motivations It is one of the best known psychological models of human needs, especially in business and organizations.

In this article we will analyze McClelland's theory of the 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.

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Introduction to the psychology of motivation

In the year 1943 American psychologist Abraham Maslow published in the magazine Psychological Review an article in which he presented the hierarchical theory of his needs. This model, popularly known as "Maslow's pyramid”, Was a fundamental milestone in the evolution of the psychology of motivation.

Maslow defined five categories of needs; from more to less basic, it is about physiological needs (nutrition, sleep, sex, etc.), security (housing, employment, health), love and belonging (friendship, sexual intimacy), recognition (self-confidence, professional success) and from 

self realisation (creativity, spontaneity, morality).

In the years that followed the popularization of Maslow's model, multiple similar approaches, such as McClelland's three needs theory, which we will describe continuation. Many of these models are framed in humanistic psychology, which claimed the tendency to personal growth of human beings.

Motivation has been a subject little studied by behaviorism and the orientations that followed it, since they focus on observable behavior; From this perspective, the most common is that motivation is conceptualized as the value of incentive that is given to a reinforcement, although sometimes ambiguous concepts such as the "impulse".

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McClelland's Three Needs Theory

In the early 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 may influence the preponderance of one or the other needs.

According to this author, motivations should be understood as unconscious processes, in a similar way to psychoanalytic approaches. That is why McClelland recommends the use of the Henry A. Murray, which belongs to the category of projective psychological evaluation tests, in order to assess the needs.

1. Affiliation need

People with a high motivation to join have strong desires to belong to social groups. They also seek to like others, so they tend to accept the opinions and preferences of others. They prefer collaboration to competition, and they are uncomfortable with situations that imply risks and lack of certainty.

According to McClelland, these people tend to be better as employees than leaders because of their greater difficulty in giving orders or prioritizing organizational objectives. However, it should be mentioned that two types of leader: the task leader, associated with high productivity, and the socio-emotional, specialist in maintaining group motivation.

The importance of the need for affiliation had already been highlighted previously 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.

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2. Need for achievement

Those who score high in need of achievement feel strong urges to achieve goals that carry a high level of challenge, and they are not opposed to taking risks in order to achieve it, as long as it is in a calculated way. In general, they prefer to work alone than in the company of other people and they like to receive feedback on the tasks they carry out.

McClelland and other authors state that the need for achievement is influenced by personal abilities to set goals, by the presence of a locus of internal control (perception of self-responsibility about life events) and for the promotion of independence by parents during the childhood.

3. Need for power

Unlike the more affiliative people, those in whom power motivation predominates enjoy competing with others - for the sake of winning of course. Those with a high need for power highly value social recognition and seek to control other people and influence their behavior, often for reasons selfish.

McClelland distinguishes two types of need for power: that of socialized power and that of personal power. People who are closer to the first type tend to care more about the others, while those with a high motivation for personal power want above all to gain power for their benefit.

People with a high motivation for power who do not simultaneously have a high level of personal responsibility have a greater probability of carrying out externalizing psychopathological behaviorssuch as physical assaults and excessive substance use.

Bibliographic references:

• Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50 (4): pp. 370 - 396.

• McClelland, D. C. (1961). The Achieving Society. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand.