David McClelland

Introduction

David Clarence McClelland (May 20, 1917 – March 27, 1998) was an American psychologist who spent his career trying to do something many of his contemporaries thought impossible: measure human motives objectively and then use those measurements to explain real-world outcomes such as economic growth, leadership, drinking behaviour and job performance. He is best known for his work on the need for achievement, for the three-needs theory of motivation built around achievement, affiliation and power, and for adapting the Thematic Apperception Test into a research instrument for scoring motivational imagery.

McClelland taught at Harvard University for three decades and finished his career at Boston University. His 1961 book The Achieving Society, which linked the achievement imagery found in a country's children's stories to that country's later economic growth, made him one of the few psychologists of his era to be read seriously by economists and historians. A survey published in Review of General Psychology in 2002 ranked him the fifteenth most cited psychologist of the twentieth century. He is also remembered for a late-career argument that intelligence tests are poor predictors of job performance and should be supplemented or replaced by assessments of competence.

Early Life and Education

McClelland was born in Mount Vernon, New York, the son of a college president and Methodist minister. He had unusually broad humanistic interests: he studied several languages, wrote a play in Latin, translated poems by Emily Dickinson into German, and as an undergraduate planned at one point to become a language teacher rather than a psychologist. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1938 and took a master's degree at the University of Missouri in 1939, then chose Yale University for doctoral study, receiving his Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1941.

Two experiences shaped the direction of his work. The first was a sabbatical year in Harvard's Department of Social Relations in 1949 and 1950, which the university's own memorial minute describes as decisive for his later interests. The second occurred during the Second World War, when he left academia briefly to work in Philadelphia for the American Friends Service Committee on behalf of conscientious objectors and refugees, and taught part-time at Bryn Mawr College. Asked at short notice to teach a course in personality, he found himself drawn to the question of how individual differences in motivation could be studied at all. McClelland remained a committed Quaker for the rest of his life.

Academic and Professional Career

After a year as an instructor at Connecticut College, McClelland joined the faculty at Wesleyan University in 1942 and stayed until 1956. It was there that he developed the experimentally based method for scoring stories written to ambiguous pictures as a measure of the strength of the achievement motive, the technique on which his reputation rests. His 1951 textbook Personality consolidated this work.

In 1956 he moved to Harvard as professor of psychology and director of the doctoral programme in clinical psychology. Under his leadership the Psychological Clinic, in which that programme was based, was renamed the Center for Research in Personality, a change that signalled how far he wanted to push the clinic away from conventional diagnostic work and toward the study of motivation in ordinary lives. He chaired Harvard's Department of Social Relations from 1962 to 1967 and supervised a generation of doctoral students who became leaders in personality and organisational psychology.

In the 1960s McClelland also founded McBer and Company, a management research and consulting firm, with David Berlew. The company was the commercial vehicle for his growing conviction that employers should assess the competencies a job actually requires rather than general intelligence. After taking emeritus status at Harvard in 1987 he became distinguished research professor at Boston University, where he continued to work on motivation and health until his death in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1998. Over his career he wrote or edited some sixteen books and more than 185 papers and chapters.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Measuring motives from fantasy

McClelland's central methodological contribution was to turn the Thematic Apperception Test from a clinical instrument into a quantifiable one. The TAT itself was not his invention; it was developed at Harvard in 1935 by Henry Murray and his colleagues, who asked people to make up stories about ambiguous pictures. What McClelland added was a rigorously specified scoring system, validated against experimentally induced motivational states, that allowed a trained coder to count achievement imagery in such stories and produce a number. Later work extended the same logic to the needs for affiliation and power. This approach embodied a distinctive claim: that motivation is a recurrent concern for a goal state, and that fantasy, not just self-report, is a legitimate window onto it.

Three-needs theory

Building on Murray's list of needs, McClelland focused on three that he believed do most of the explanatory work in adult life. The need for achievement is the desire to excel against a standard of excellence, and it draws people toward tasks of moderate difficulty where their own effort makes a difference and where they can obtain concrete feedback. The need for affiliation is the desire for warm, close relationships and for being accepted. The need for power is the desire to have impact, to influence or control others and to be recognised as influential. McClelland argued that these needs are learned rather than innate, that they are largely acquired in childhood, and that people differ in their profile of them in ways that shape careers, leadership styles and health. His later work distinguished implicit motives, measured from fantasy, from self-attributed motives, measured by questionnaires, and argued that the two systems are largely independent and predict different kinds of behaviour.

Achievement motivation and economic development

The Achieving Society (1961) was McClelland's most ambitious and most controversial book. He and his collaborators coded achievement imagery in the folk tales and children's readers of many countries and argued that levels of achievement motivation predicted subsequent economic growth, in some historical analyses by several decades. The implication was that development policy should pay attention to motivation as well as to capital. McClelland went on to test this experimentally, running achievement-motivation training courses for business owners in India and reporting that participants subsequently showed more entrepreneurial activity, including job creation, than comparison groups.

Competence rather than intelligence

In a widely cited 1973 article in American Psychologist, McClelland argued that traditional intelligence and personality tests predict occupational success poorly, and that selection should instead identify the competencies that distinguish effective from ineffective performers. With colleagues he developed the Behavioral Event Interview, in which outstanding and average performers describe specific incidents from their work in detail, and the differences are used to build a competency model. This work founded the competency movement in human resource management and remains McClelland's most commercially influential legacy.

Motivation, power and health

In his later years McClelland applied motive measurement to physiology and health. Power: The Inner Experience (1975) examined the development and consequences of the power motive, including its relationship to drinking and to leadership failure; The Drinking Man (1972), written with William Davis, Rudolf Kalin and Eric Wanner, studied alcohol use as a function of power motivation. This work anticipated later interest in the physiological correlates of social motives.

Major Publications

McClelland, D. C. (1951). Personality. New York: William Sloane Associates.
McClelland, D. C., Atkinson, J. W., Clark, R. A., & Lowell, E. L. (1953). The Achievement Motive. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
McClelland, D. C., Baldwin, A. L., Bronfenbrenner, U., & Strodtbeck, F. L. (1958). Talent and Society. New York: Van Nostrand.
McClelland, D. C. (1961). The Achieving Society. New York: Van Nostrand.
McClelland, D. C., & Winter, D. G. (1969). Motivating Economic Achievement. New York: Free Press.
McClelland, D. C., Davis, W. N., Kalin, R., & Wanner, E. (1972). The Drinking Man: Alcohol and Human Motivation. New York: Free Press.
McClelland, D. C. (1973). Testing for competence rather than for "intelligence". American Psychologist, 28(1), 1–14.
McClelland, D. C. (1975). Power: The Inner Experience. New York: Irvington.
McClelland, D. C. (1985). Human Motivation. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman.
McClelland, D. C. (1984). Motives, Personality, and Society: Selected Papers. New York: Praeger.

Impact and Legacy

McClelland's influence runs in three directions that are rarely combined: the academic study of human motives, the practice of personnel selection, and the application of psychology to economic development. The concept of the need for achievement is now standard material in introductory psychology and in management education, and the competency framework he helped create is embedded in the hiring and promotion practices of large organisations. He received the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions in 1987, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and held a Guggenheim Fellowship.

His methods, however, have been criticised more persistently than almost any other measurement tradition in personality psychology. The core objection concerns reliability. In a review of the TAT literature, Doris Entwisle concluded that the internal consistency of the McClelland scoring scheme for achievement imagery typically fell between .30 and .40, and that test-retest coefficients over intervals of several weeks were often around .30 as well. A later assessment of projective techniques commissioned for the American Psychological Association reached essentially the same conclusion and noted that the problem had not been resolved in the intervening decades. Critics also pointed out that TAT measures of achievement motivation correlate only weakly with questionnaire measures of the same construct. William Spangler's 1992 meta-analysis of 105 studies put the average correlation at about .09.

McClelland and his colleagues offered a substantive reply rather than a denial. They argued that low internal consistency is the wrong standard for a measure in which each picture is an independent sample of behaviour rather than an interchangeable test item, that low test-retest correlations partly reflect respondents' belief that they should produce different stories on a second occasion, and that the near-zero correlation with questionnaires is a prediction rather than a problem: implicit motives and self-attributed motives are two different systems. Spangler's meta-analysis gave this position partial support. TAT measures did predict outcomes, and did so more strongly than questionnaire measures when the outcome was assessed under intrinsic or task-related achievement incentives, whereas questionnaire measures did better under external or social incentives. The debate therefore shifted from whether TAT measures work to what exactly they measure.

The economic-development thesis has fared less well. Critics argued that the cross-national correlations were vulnerable to reverse causation, that the proxies used for both motivation and development were crude, and that attributing national poverty to a deficit of achievement motivation risks blaming the poor for structural conditions, including colonial extraction and unequal trade, that they did not create. McClelland's own intervention studies were meant to answer the causal objection, but reviewers noted that the training programmes bundled motivational instruction with business planning, contact with other entrepreneurs and, in some versions, access to credit, which left the active ingredient unclear. A related criticism applies to his competency work: because he had a commercial stake in McBer and Company, his advocacy of competency-based selection over intelligence testing involved a conflict of interest that critics have not hesitated to name, and later evaluations of competency modelling have questioned the strength of the reliability and validity evidence behind it.

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References

McClelland, D. C. (1961). The Achieving Society. Van Nostrand.