David Macclelland's 3 Needs Theory

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David McClelland Three Needs Theory McClelland identified three needs important in the workplace. McClelland used projective pictures and storytelling as a way of identifying the position of these needs. McClelland's experiment -- the Thematic Apperception Tesdt (TAT) -- consisted of showing individuals a series of pictures and asking them to give brief descriptions of what was happening in the pictures. The responses were analyzed in terms of the presence or absence of certain themes. The themes McClelland and his associates were looking for revolved around the following motivators: achievement, affiliation and power. So he proposed that a person's motivation and effectiveness in certain job functions are influenced by these three needs i.e. 1. Need to achieve 2. Need for power 3. Need for affiliation Need to achieve (n-ach)achievement motivation: It is a desire to do something better or more efficiently than it was done before. There is a strong need for feedback as to achievement and progress, and a need for a sense of accomplishment. Achievement is reflected in stories about attaining challenging goals, setting new records, successful completion of difficult tasks, and doing something not done before. People with a high need for achievement seek to do extremely well and thus tend to avoid both low-risk and high-risk situations. Achievers avoid low-risk situations because the easily attained success is not a genuine achievement. In high-risk projects, achievers see the outcome as one of chance rather than one's own effort. High n-ach individuals prefer work that has a moderate probability of success, ideally a 50% chance. They prefer either to work alone or with other high achievers. The high achievers don’t necessarily make good HR managers because they focus on their own accomplishment while good HR managers emphasize helping others
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