Motivation

Introduction

Why do some people spend their time thinking about accomplishing tasks whereas others tend to reflect on their relationships? What personal characteristics determine whether people will flourish versus flounder in particular domains? Why are some people successful at reaching their personal goals whereas others fail when faced with distractions and obstacles? Why do some individuals display enhanced well-being after reaching their goals whereas others do not? These are the types of questions that motivational researchers have sought to answer over the past 50 years. The classic approach to these questions involved the assessment of individual differences in the strength of psychological needs for achievement, affiliation, and power. Such needs were conceptualized as relatively stable dispositions that are learned early in life and that predispose individuals to strive for certain classes of goals. Whether such needs are best measured through content-analysis of verbal material or via self-report of goal preferences has been the topic of lively debate. More recently, an alternative conception of needs as necessary psychological [Page 590]nutriments rather than collections of desires has been proposed. Three essential needs have been identified – for autonomy, competence, and relatedness – and the focus has shifted to examining the extent to which goal selection and subsequent self-regulatory efforts support versus hinder the satisfaction of these needs.

Assessing Motives in Imaginative Story Content

Fifty years have passed since McClelland, Atkinson, and their colleagues (1953) began a research tradition founded on the assumption that there is a pattern and organization to the flow of human behaviour which can partly be understood in terms of underlying psychological motive dispositions such as the need for achievement or the need for affiliation. These psychological motives were conceptualized as enduring features of personality that energized, directed, and selected wide varieties of behaviour and experience. Individual differences in the strength of various motives were thought to be most directly assessed by examining the content of people's imaginative thoughts. This belief was based on the assumption that expressive behaviours, such as fantasies, reflected internal motive dispositions more uniquely than did perception, action, or judgement which are strongly influenced by determinants in external reality (McClelland, 1988).

The most widely used motive scoring system was developed to assess the need for achievement. Respondents are asked to write brief stories in response to four to six ambiguous picture cues (e.g. a picture of an architect at his desk with a photo of his family in front of him). The written stories are coded according to a detailed and explicit scoring system. Scoring is based on the presence and level of elaboration of achievement themes. The scoring system was developed by comparing the thematic content of stories told by individuals whose achievement motive had been experimentally aroused versus participants in a neutral condition. The nAch scoring system is objective, quantitative, and yields high levels of agreement among trained coders. It has been validated with participants from cultures as diverse as Germany, Japan, and Brazil. Similar scoring systems were developed to assess the needs for power and affiliation. The most recent versions of the content-coding systems for social motives are available in the Handbook of Thematic Content Analysis (Smith, 1992). (Table 1 provides references for all instruments discussed in the present entry.)

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