Achievement Motivation

Measuring Achievement Motivation

Achievement motivation is usually measured by content analysis of spoken or written text because people are often unable or unwilling to report directly on their own motives. Because achievement is a socially valued term (in U.S. culture, at least), people may exaggerate their intrinsic concerns with doing well; hence, the content analysis measure does not usually correlate with direct questionnaire measures. Verbal images scored for achievement motivation involve being concerned with public or personal standards of excellence, or winning (nonaggressive) competitions (rather than having impact, which would be power motive imagery). Many people (perhaps especially U.S. citizens) confuse achievement and power. Perhaps the distinction can be highlighted by the old adage attributed to the U.S. essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Build a better mousetrap [achievement], and the world will beat a path to your door [power].” An achievement-motivated person would be more concerned with mousetrap quality than with the world's reaction, whereas a power-motivated person could devise many ways of drawing the world's attention—including renting, buying, or even capturing a better mousetrap.

Achievement Motivation and Behavior

People scoring high in achievement motivation are drawn to intrinsic, task-related incentives rather than the social incentives that might result from successful performance. They are restless and innovative, seeking and using new information and advice from experts. They learn from their previous performance—even their failures—and are not afraid to modify their behavior on the basis of results. They take moderate risks, can delay gratification (probably because they experience time as moving relatively fast), and have an unobtrusive, even somber personal style. They bargain in a rational, cooperative way. They strive for upward social mobility. For all these reasons it is scarcely surprising that achievement-motivated people are often successful in business—particularly as salespeople or as heads of small, innovative high-technology firms. In other words, achievement motivation appears to drive specifically entrepreneurial leadership. This finding has been confirmed in a variety of cultural settings and economic systems. At the national or cultural level, high levels of achievement motivation in cultural documents such as popular fiction or schoolchildren's readers are associated with subsequent levels of economic performance and development.

Thus, achievement motivation, as measured by content analysis, is specifically economic or entrepreneurial: It is usually unrelated to academic or scientific achievement or success in large bureaucratic organizations.

The Strange Relationship of Achievement Motivation to Political Leadership

In politics, however, achievement motivation has a quite different and substantially negative relation to successful leadership. Among U.S. presidents, for example, achievement motivation is not associated with historians' ratings of greatness, and it is negatively associated with ratings of charisma derived from analysis of subordinates' memoirs. Achievement-motivated presidents of the modern era are viewed by scholars of the presidency as lacking political skills, organizational capacity, and emotional maturity. The political scientist James David Barber categorizes such presidents as “active negative”—active in promoting their idealistic programs but not enjoying the office of president. Frustrations and impatience drive them, surprisingly, to rigidity and failure to compromise, so that their administrations often end in failure. Thus, in 1919 U.S. President Woodrow Wilson failed to reach his political and foreign policy objectives through a refusal to compromise and then ruined his health by attempting to go over the heads of members of Congress and take his case “to the people.” In the judgment of history many of Lyndon Johnson's domestic accomplishments disappeared into the quagmire of Vietnam. Richard Nixon took unethical, unconstitutional, and illegal steps to prop up faltering policies and programs. Jimmy Carter tried to micromanage.

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