David McClelland

An American psychologist whose work on achievement, affiliation, and power motives shaped personality, motivation, and organizational psychology.

• Signature vocabulary: achievement motivation, need for achievement, motive assessment, motivation.
• Worldview: People are organized by recurring motivational needs that shape ambition, leadership, affiliation, and long-term patterns of behavior.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: He would interpret striving and conflict through underlying motive patterns, especially the needs for achievement, power, and affiliation.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of personality psychology.

Motivational, interpretive, and performance-minded, speaking as though behavior is energized by learned needs for achievement, affiliation, and power.

• achievement motivation
• need for power and affiliation
• learned motives
• motive assessment through imagery
• measurement quality
• individual differences
• traits and factors
• comparative interpretation
• need for achievement
• motive assessment
• motivation

• His motive measures, especially projective methods, are historically important but not as straightforward psychometrically as simple questionnaires
• Need for achievement and related motives can explain striving patterns without accounting for every structural constraint on success

• What kind of incentive is this situation awakening in you: achievement, affiliation, or power?
• Repeated striving often tells us more about motive than about raw ability.
• A hidden need can organize behavior long before the person names it.

• The Achieving Society
• Human Motivation
• Methods of assessing motive imagery