David C.

McClelland

Richard E. Boyatzis, PhD

Distinguished University Professor

Case Western Reserve University

Richard.boyatzis@case.edu

December 5, 2016

For The Wiley Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

Volume IV: Clinical, Applied and Cross –Cultural Research

Word Count: 2,032

Abstract

David C. McClelland was an internationally recognized, motivation psychologist because of his

profound research into achievement, affiliation and power and his commitment to applying the

findings to enhance people’s lives and society. He led efforts to develop entrepreneurs in dozens

of countries of the world, many in developing economics. He applied his work to managerial and

leadership effectiveness, created the field of competency based human resources, and even

extended his work into studies of healing, meditation and psychophysiological processes. His

legions of former doctoral students and colleagues continue the research and applications today

in universities throughout the world as well as having created and built many consulting

companies.

Keywords: McClelland, motivation, competencies, achievement, affiliation, power, motivation

change, projective tests, culture

David C. McClelland, formerly of Harvard University and Boston University

Areas of research: human motivation, operant measures, competencies, health, leadership

Early Life and Educational Background

Born: May 20, 1917 in Mt. Vernon, New York, USA

Died: March 27, 1998 in Lexington, Massachusetts, USA

Married first: Mary Sharpless, 1938, five children: Catherine, Duncan, Nicholas, Sarah, Jabez;

second Marian Adams, 1984, two children: Mira and Usha

Completed PhD in psychology, Yale University, 1941

Professor at Wesleyan University, Connecticut 1942-1956; American Friends Service Committee

and Instructor, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, 1943-1945

Programme Director, Ford Foundation, 1952-53

Harvard University, 1949-50, 1956-1987, professor and chairman; Department of Social

Relations from 1962-1967, professor emeritus, 1987-1998

Founded McBer and Company, 1963

Boston University, professor, 1987-1998

Research Interests

David C. McClelland made major research contributions in motivation, conscious

thought, competencies and healing. He also made major contributions to research in methods by

championing conscious thought and thematic coding of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

as well as other forms of audio, video and written documents. As a research psychologist, his

work was relatively unique in initiating major programs and fields of endeavor in a wide range of

fields from education to clinical practice, management to economic development, substance

abuse treatment to healing sciences. It could be said that there were three major themes in his

work directly related to personality and individual differences. The development of the

expectancy-value theory of human motives focusing on the Needs for Achievement, Affiliation,

Power. The second theme was the development of tests and operant methods, such as the

Thematic Apperception Test, Behavioral Event Interview, and the Test of Thematic Analysis,

that used have been in research and applications. The third theme was the development of job-

competency studies and methods as a way to link human ability to performance.

A Theory of Human Motives

According to David McClelland, human motivation is “a recurrent concern for a goal

state or condition as measured in fantasy which drives, directs and selects the behavior of the

individual.” Working with Henry Murray in the 1940’s, he focused on three particular motives:

the Need for Achievement (N Ach); the Need for Affiliation (N Aff); and the Need for Power (N

Pow). His work focused from the late 1940’s through the 1960’s was focused on N Ach. In the

late 1960’s and through to the 1990’s, N Pow emerged as the focal point of his research.
The Need for Achievement is an unconscious drive to do better toward a standard of

excellence. People with strong Need for Achievement measure themselves against specific

goals. They prefer moderate risks, prefer individualistic activities, recreation involving getting a

score, like bowling, and prefer occupations with individual performance data, like sales.

The Need for Power is an unconscious drive to have impact on others. People with

strong N Pow often assert themselves by taking leadership positions, gambling, drinking

alcoholic beverages, and committing aggressive acts. They often have high blood pressure, and

prefer interpersonally competitive sports, such as football. They liked to collect possessions that

connote prestige to others and prefer occupations in which they can help or have impact on

others, like teachers or leaders.

The Need for Affiliation is an unconscious drive to be a part of warm, close relationships,

like friendships. People with strong N Aff: choose to spend time with close friends or significant

others, used to write letters or telephone friends or family, prefer to work in groups and are

sensitive to others’ reactions. They prefer collaborative activities and occupations in which they

work closely with others, such as elementary school teachers and counselors.

Beyond the separate motives, McClelland emphasized the pattern of one’s relative motive

strength. His claimed that everyone has some level of the motives, but the relative dominance

varied. The pattern of a person’s motive strength that is indicative of occupational performance.

For example, high N Ach, low N Aff, and moderate N Pow is characteristic of successful
entrepreneurs throughout the world. High N Pow, moderate to low N Aff, moderate N Ach, and

high Activity Inhibition (i.e., a measure of self-control) is characteristic of effective leaders,

middle-level and executive managers.

In addition to studying motives of individuals, David McClelland initiated a series of

studies of motivational trends of societies. He established an empirical link between motivational

themes in cultural modes of expression (e.g., hymns, myths, and children’s books) and national

events (e.g., the rise and fall of an economy, social movements, and wars).

McClelland’s definitions, data, and applications were cited as the most useful approach to
motivation in a study by the former accounting firm Touche Ross & Company in 1981.

In Search of Operant Tests and Measures

David McClelland had been a proponent of operant methods (i.e., tests where a person

must generate thoughts or actions) from his early days of research in the US Navy on

submariners in the 1940’s. He argued that operant methods had greater validity and sensitivity

than respondent measures (i.e., tests calling for a true/false, rating or ranking response) but were

often overlooked by research psychologists because they suffered from less traditional measures

of reliability.

In the Thematic Apperception Test, a person creates and tells a story about what is

happening after looking at a picture for about a minute. As a classic projective test, it moved

from the clinician’s realm into research with Henry Murray’s work in the 1920’s. The pictures

were selected to be somewhat ambiguous and allow the person to project. Later, in the 1970’s,

McClelland advocated for a direct behavioral sampling of a person’s actions, as well as thoughts

and feelings through the Behavioral Event interview, a person is asked to, “tell about a time,

recently, when you felt effective in your job.” This was a modified critical incident interview as

described by Flanagan in 1954. But McClelland’s insight was to use it to assess a person’s

behavioral patterns, not just a job or task or situation.

 Specifically, McClelland developed compelling evidence to show that operant methods,

as compared to respondent methods, consistently show: (a) more criterion validity; (b) less test-

retest reliability; (c) greater sensitivity (i.e., discriminate mood changes, style differences, and

other somewhat subtle, dynamic aspects of human thought and behavior); (d) more uniqueness

and are less likely to suffer from multicollinearity; (e) greater cross-cultural validity because it

did not require a person to respond to prepared items; and (f) increased utility in applications to

human or organizational development.

The key to rigorous research and ethical use of operant methods is the process of reliably
coding the raw information, whether from audio, video tapes or historical documents.

McClelland extended thematic analysis from a highly unreliable, clinical art form to a legitimate

research method. To achieve validity, the coding of the raw information requires consistency of

judgment, or inter-rater reliability. It is difficult, if not impossible to achieve reliability without a

clear, explicit codebook. The use of codebooks and reliable coding opened the doors to many

new measures. These measures, in turn, allowed creative inquiry into a wide range of people’s

behavior and outcomes.

Job Competencies and Assessing Behavior

McClelland and colleagues in 1958 conceptualized a broad array of skills as a reflection

of a person’s capability. Reviving his earlier personality theory from 1951, McClelland and his

colleagues at McBer and Company expanded the search for competencies in the early 1970’s

(i.e., skills, self-image, traits, and motives) with operant methods in many occupations. In this

approach, the definition of a job competency differs from many behaviorist approaches to the

identification of skills in that the job competency definition requires that the person’s intent be

understood, not merely observation of the person’s actions. As a result of this inductive design

and using operant methods, there was an emphasis on characteristics of the “person,” rather than

the tasks involved in a job.

 Using operant methods to explore the differences in thoughts, feelings, and behavior of

superior performers as compared to average or poor performers, competency models were

developed and validated against performance in a job. Studies were completed on bank tellers,

social workers, police, priests, generals and admirals, executives, sales representatives, scientists,

programmers, project managers, and so forth.

The competency assessment methods developed a picture of how the superior performer

thinks, feels, and acts in his work setting. This contextual and concrete picture provided case

studies and models for how to help anyone in a job, or aspiring to one, develop their capability.
As professionals in organizations were trained in the techniques of job competency assessment,

they developed competency-based training programs, career path systems, developmental

assessment programs, coaching and guidance programs, recruiting, selection, and promotion

systems. Because of its face validity and growing use by practitioners, academic researchers

were alarmed. It took another 30 years before scholarly research was appearing regularly in peer

reviewed journals.

In his last published work, David McClelland extended understanding of the impact of

competencies on performance by postulating a “tipping point.” In addition to knowing which

competencies are needed to be effective in a job, he examined a way to determine how much of

each competency was sufficient to attain outstanding performance.

Helping People Change

One of David McClelland somewhat unique perspectives was a refined sensitivity to

relevance of one’s research. He wanted to develop insight that might help people and our social

systems be more humane as well as effective and innovative. It began with David’s concept of

changing motives -- if you know how people with a certain motive think and act, a person

change their motives by changing the ways they think and act. After years of experiments in

countries throughout the world, several observations can be made: people can change the shape

of their motive profile; people will only change if they want to change; change cannot occur
without a change in the person’s environmental supports; and any of these attempts at

motivational change increased a person’s sense of efficacy.

The earliest efforts by McClelland were to stimulate business and economic development

by training small business owners in achievement thinking and behavior. It worked in India and

other countries and then with minority owned and operated small businesses in the US. The

method was extended to the power motive in efforts to help alcoholics and then executives and

middle-level managers in industry, even within the context of community development.

Concluding Thoughts

David C. McClelland had an impact on many fields and scholarly traditions. Through his

own work and over the decades, those of his former doctoral students, and now their doctoral

students, he has directly and indirectly trained legions of scholars, consultants, and leaders-

stimulating their curiosity, guiding and often provoking them to contribute to various

occupational fields and professions. He was a founder or influential director of over fourteen for-

profit and not-for-profit research and consulting companies, the most notable of which is McBer

and Company, now The Hay Group/Korn Ferry. Most of all David was, to many of us, a close

personal friend, as well as a colleague.

See Also:
wbepid0160 Projection Techniques, General Features and Methodological Issues
wbepid0164 Thematic Apperception Test
wbepid0269 Motivation (achievement, affiliation, power)
wbepid0231 Culture and Personality
wbepid0064 Needs, McClelland Theory of

References

McClelland, D.C. (1951). Personality. NY: William Sloane Associates.

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

McClelland, D.C. (1965). “Toward a theory of motive acquisition.” American Psychologist. 20,
 pp. 321-333.

McClelland, D.C. (1973). “Testing for competence rather than intelligence.” American

Psychologist. 28, pp. 1-14.

McClelland, D.C. (1975). Power: The Inner Experience. NY: Irvington.

McClelland, D.C. (1985). Human Motivation. NY: Cambridge University Press.

McClelland, D.C. (1998). Identifying competencies with behavioral event interviews.

Psychological Science. 9(5), 331-339.

McClelland, D.C. and Winter, D.G. (1969). Motivating Economic Achievement. NY: Free Press.
McClelland, D.C., Davis, W.N., Kalin, R., and Wanner, E. (1972). The Drinking Man: Alcohol

and Human Motivation. NY: Free Press.

McClelland, D.C. and Boyatzis, R.E. (1982). “The leadership motive pattern and long-term

success in management.” Journal of Applied Psychology. 67(6). pp. 737-743.

Further Reading

Boyatzis, R.E. (1998). Transforming Qualitative Information: Thematic Analysis and Code

Development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

McClelland, D.C. (1984). Motives, Personality, and Society: Selected Papers. NY: Praeger.

Smith, C.P., with Atkinson, J.W., McClelland, D.C., and Veroff, J. (eds.) (1992). Motivation and

Personality: Handbook of Thematic Content Analysis. NY: Cambridge University Press.

Author Brief Biography:

Richard E. Boyatzis is Distinguished University Professor and Professor in the Departments of
Organizational Behavior, Psychology, and Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve
University, and Horvitz Professor of Family Business and Adjunct Professor in
People/Organizations at ESADE. He was ranked #9 Most Influential International Thinker by
HR Magazine in 2012 and 2014. He is the author of more than 200 articles on leadership,
emotional intelligence, coaching and neuroscience. His MOOC Inspiring Leadership Through
Emotional Intelligence has over 625,000 enrolled from 215 countries. His 8 books include: The
Competent Manager; Primal Leadership with Goleman and McKee; and Resonant Leadership
with McKee.