What is achievement motivation?

Introduction

Achievement motivation can be understood simply as the tendency to strive for success or to attain a desirable goal. Embedded within this definition are a number of important implications. First, it is suggested that achievement motivation involves an inclination on the part of the individual. Historically, this has included a consideration of the individual’s personality and how that personality influences a motivational state, given the presence of certain environmental factors. Since the 1980s, the focus of achievement motivation research has shifted from individual differences in personality to the cognitive, situational, and contextual determinants of achievement. Second, achievement usually involves a task-oriented behavior that can be evaluated. Third, the task orientation usually involves some standard of excellence that may be either internally or externally imposed.

Henry A. Murray, in his influential book Explorations in Personality (1938), conceived of personality as a series of needs that involve a “readiness to respond” in certain ways under specific conditions. One of these is the need for achievement. He defined the need as a desire or tendency to “overcome obstacles, to exercise power, to strive to achieve something difficult as well as and as quickly as possible.” Thus, achievement is a generalized need. Like many later motivational theorists, Murray argued that the pleasure of achievement is not in attaining the goal but rather in developing and exercising skills. In other words, it is the process that provides the motivation for achievement.

David McClelland and his many associates at Harvard University furthered the idea of needs in several decades’ worth of work in learned needs theory. McClelland argued that people, regardless of culture or gender, are driven by three motives: achievement, affiliation, and influence. The need for achievement is characterized by the wish to find solutions to problems, master complex tasks, set goals, and obtain feedback on one’s level of success. McClelland proposed that these needs were socially acquired or learned.

John Atkinson, who collaborated with McClelland in some early work, developed a distinctively cognitive theory of achievement motivation that still retained the basic ideas of McClelland’s theory—that people select and work toward goals because they have an underlying need to achieve. Atkinson made two important additions. First, he argued that the achievement motive is determined by two opposing inclinations: a tendency to approach success and a tendency to avoid failure. The first tendency is manifested by engaging in achievement-oriented activities, while the second tendency is manifested by not engaging in such activities. Second, Atkinson suggested that these two fundamental needs interact with expectations (the perceived probability of success or failure of the action) and values (the degree of pride in accomplishment versus the degree of shame in failure).

Several modifications were subsequently offered by Atkinson and others. For example, an important distinction between extrinsic motivation (engagement in a task for an external reward, such as a school grade or a pay raise) and intrinsic motivation (engagement in a task as a pleasure in its own right, with some standard of performance as a goal in itself) was developed to explain why some people may still engage in achievement activities, such as attending school or accepting a demanding job, even when their tendency to avoid failure is greater than their tendency to seek success.

Bernard Weiner’s
Explanatory Style Theory (1972) developed out of the observation that people have different explanations for success and failure. He postulates in the book that success and failure at achievement tasks may be attributed to any of four factors: ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck. These four factors can be classified along two dimensions: locus of control
(internal versus external) and stability (stable versus unstable). Internals believe that their successes and failures result from their own actions. Whether they succeed or fail, they attribute the outcome to their ability or to the effort they expended. Externals, in contrast, tend to believe that success or failure is beyond their control. They succeed because they had an easy task or were lucky. They fail because they had a difficult task or were unlucky.

In Self-Theories (1999), Carol Dweck and her associates suggest that differences in achievement can be understood through the implicit theories that people have about the origins of their competency. People who adopt a performance orientation tend to attribute their successes and failures to unchanging personal traits such as ability. They also tend to pursue extrinsic rewards. People who adopt a mastery orientation tend to focus less on ability and more on the process of overcoming obstacles and solving problems. They tend to find internal rewards very appealing and seek out and enjoy the challenge posed by difficult tasks.

Practical Achievement

Achievement motivation is an important psychological concept, and it is useful in explaining why some people are more successful in attaining goals than are others. In general, people with a higher need for achievement, people with a more internal locus of control, and people who pursue mastery goals tend to do better than their performance-oriented, external-locus-of-control, low-achievement-need counterparts.

McClelland, Dweck, Weiner, and their associates have studied the relationship between achievement motivation and academic and vocational performance. Their conclusions are remarkably similar: High achievement motivation is generally a desirable trait that leads to more successful performance. Students who are higher in achievement motivation maintain higher grades, enjoy school and academic challenges more, and show greater persistence than students with low achievement motivation. In business, it appears that entrepreneurs require a high need for achievement to function successfully.

One of the most interesting applications in the study of achievement motivation has involved gender differences. Women and men may experience achievement motivation in considerably different ways. Most of the research conducted by McClelland and Atkinson during the 1950s and 1960s was with men only, in part on the basis of the belief that men need success and women need approval. With women’s changing roles in society, however, the study of achievement motivation in women has flourished since the late 1960s.

Early research indicated that women evince less need for achievement than do men. One explanation was derived from Atkinson’s expectancy value model, which suggested that women fear success out of concern for the negative social consequences they may experience if they achieve too much. An example would be a girl who lets her boyfriend win when they play tennis. In part, she may be concerned about his feelings, but she may also believe that she will be better accepted (by him and others) if she loses.

While it is clear that some people, especially some women, may not find as much delight in winning as do others, subsequent research has suggested that some of the original conclusions may have been overstated. In fact, in terms of Janet Spence and Robert Helmreich’s three-factor model of achievement motivation, it appears that the structure of men’s and women’s achievement motives are more similar than they are different. When sex differences do emerge, women tend to be slightly higher than men in work orientation, while men seem to be slightly higher in mastery and considerably higher in competitiveness.

Another interesting application has centered on ethnic differences in achievement. It has commonly been noted that children from ethnic minority groups perform much lower than average in a variety of achievement-oriented measures. These findings are frequently presented in terms of “deficits.” The central comparison group is middle-class white students. Much of this work is confounded by a failure to consider
socioeconomic status. When ethnicity and socioeconomic status are investigated in the same study, social class is a far better predictor of achievement than is ethnicity. Further research suggests that encouraging ethnic minority children of low socioeconomic status to pursue mastery goals leads to improvements in academic success.

McClelland also attempted to demonstrate the potential benefits of increasing achievement motivation in certain populations. Through various educational programs, increasing achievement motivation has helped raise the standard of living for the poor, has helped in the control of alcoholism, and has helped make business management more effective. McCelland also developed, with apparent success, an elaborate program designed to increase achievement motivation among businesspeople, especially in developing nations.

Historic Achievement

The study of achievement motivation grew out of two separate perspectives in the study of personality. The first perspective is the psychoanalytic tradition of Sigmund Freud
. Murray was a committed Freudian in his theory of personality, stressing an unconscious dynamic interaction of three personality components: the id, the ego, and the superego. Psychoanalytic thought stresses the similarity of motives among all people by focusing on these driving forces from the unconscious domain of the personality. Murray’s contribution to the psychoanalytic tradition is the concept of need, which is understood as an entity that unconsciously organizes one’s perception of and one’s action orientation toward the world. One of these needs is the need for achievement.

The second major perspective is the trait, or dispositional, tradition in personality theory. This perspective assumes that there are measurable individual differences between people in terms of their needs and motives; that these individual differences are relatively stable over time and manifest themselves in a wide variety of behaviors; and that motives (including the achievement motive), as dispositions within people, provide the basis of behavior. Thus, the emphasis within the trait tradition is on individuals’ differences of motives. The psychoanalytic and trait approaches intersect in Murray’s theory, which is one reason that theory is so important in psychology.

In addition, developments in industrial and postindustrial twentieth century societies made the time ripe for the study of achievement. McClelland suggested that achievement motivation may explain economic differences between societies. In his book The Achieving Society (1961), McClelland attempts to predict the economic growth of twenty-three countries from 1929 to 1950 on the basis of images of achievement found in children’s stories published in those countries between 1920 and 1929. He found that those societies that emphasized achievement through children’s stories generally experienced greater economic growth. Although direct cause-and-effect relationships could not be established in a study such as this, subsequent research using experimental studies provided some support for McClelland’s position.

Finally, developments in academic achievement testing and vocational performance testing since the early part of the twentieth century have provided a natural setting for measuring attainment in these domains. As more and more tests were developed, and as they became increasingly sophisticated in measuring achievement, it became readily apparent that a conceptual model of achievement was necessary.

Bibliography

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