Motivation for Action
Image by Miguel Bruna
In Director of Assessment Ziva Mann’s last blog post, she discussed the importance of assessing personality and doing it well. She also referred to one of the key traits we assess, which too many do not: motivation. If you want to know what drives people, whether to tap into it, engage with it, or align with it, you need to know this. It’s the fuel for people’s thoughts, choices, and preferences.
Motives and Values
Everyone knows emotions move human beings in many ways; 20th century psychologists started to identify particular emotional drives. Implicit motives are the deep emotional drives which people may not even be consciously aware of, but can be thought of as “gut feelings” – what you like, what you enjoy, what energizes you are resonates with you, or what will frustrate you if it is blocked. We have reason to think these come from the “mammal brain,” and thus are not limited to humans; but we express them in far more complex ways.[i] They can be strongly influenced in early childhood, when the brain is more plastic,[ii] but are generally quite stable and difficult to change in adulthood.
This is distinct from explicit motives, or “values,” which are conscious, shaped by parental and societal influence, but much more flexible and adaptable to changes in life and situation. If you ask people what motivates them, this is what they will typically describe.
These two do not correlate at all – unsurprisingly, as they are likely to be from entirely different parts of the brain – so between them they describe the complex internal pressures one brings to making decisions and choices.[iii] We can summarize it as: things you want to do or enjoy, versus things you should do or think are important. As you might expect, the implicit, emotional motives tend to be longer-term drivers for people throughout their lives: when all else is equal, you gravitate naturally to what feels right. The explicit, conscious values tend to predict near-term choices: what is important to do right now?
For our work, we tend to focus on the implicit motives. Executives tend to be people who require a lot of energy just to do their jobs, so alignment of motives with jobs is particularly important for them, especially since they are not conscious, so people can find themselves in roles that fit their values but not their motives. Given that they are hard to see, but are not only very important but very stable, expert assessment has particular value when looking into motives.
The founder of this particular approach to motivation, Henry Murray, identified dozens of such motives in his clinical work, but practically speaking no one is driven by 30-40 motives at once in daily life.[iv] David McClelland narrowed it down to the three that account for approximately 85% of daily thinking time, and those are the ones we focus on as well.
Everyone has all three of these motives, but to different degrees; since they have no relationship to each other, effectively you can have any combination of high, medium, or low, but most people have one that stands out by random chance.
The Three Motives
Achievement Motive: People with this motive spontaneously think about and get energized by doing things better, either through innovation or being more efficient. They tend to like measurement of their performance, and look for such measures, so they know how well they are doing, and set goals in order to meet or beat them.[v]
Affiliation Motive: People with this motive spontaneously think about and get energized by interpersonal relationships: lovers, friends, family, or belonging to a group. They tend to be alert to whether others like them, and are sensitive to issues that could interfere with a personal relationship.[vi]
Influence Motive: People with this motive spontaneously think about and get energized by having an impacton others – individuals, groups, an organization, or the world at large. They tend to be alert to other influencers or influence, and are sensitive to political or social issues that may affect the impact they can have.[vii]
Note that these are not capabilities, but drivers. You can be extremely high on the Influence motive and terrible at influencing people, because, for example, you lack empathy. But they are key to helping people find the most satisfying career or job. If you have to make yourself do the job (i.e., using your conscious values), it will drain you and exhaust you. But if you inherently enjoy what the job requires, it will energize you.
In fact, past studies have shown that motives alone can predict career trajectories a decade in advance with 67% accuracy, which is astonishingly high without considering any other factor.[viii] It’s certainly higher than other personality measures, which, while useful (especially to analyze leadership style and cultural alignment), only explain 10% of job performance.[ix]
We’re not talking about “picking a job you love;” instead, we’re talking about a job where most of what you have to do every day is emotionally satisfying, which is a very good predictor of long-term success, and an excellent one if you have the capabilities as well. And this is key to what we look for: not just what people can do, but what they willdo, are likely to do, and are energized to do. No matter what your capabilities, if you don’t want to use them, they become irrelevant to job performance.
Motives and Roles
This is an area we discuss with our clients and those we assess in great depth, but here are a few areas in which we find roles and motives align, just to give you an idea:
Achievement motive: Roles focused on efficiency, goal accomplishment, and innovation:
Entrepreneurs
Salespeople (especially shorter-cycle sales)
Finance
Engineers
Scientists
Influence motive: Roles focused on influencing and having impact on others:
Organizational leaders and managers
Coaches
Consultative salespeople (longer-cycle)
Partnership creators
Speakers and writers
Affiliation motive: Affiliation is less often a direct driver of business and more typically a binding force holding together people because:
They like each other
They are proud to belong to something bigger than themselves
There are, of course, combinations of these as well, so for example a turnaround CEO is often high in Achievement and Influence, and quite low in Affiliation, for reasons that should probably be obvious.
When a motive permeates a company, it can become a fundamental characteristic of its culture as well. Silicon Valley companies are often driven by Achievement from top to bottom, e.g., Apple’s tag lines “Think Different” and “The Power to Be Your Best,” both of which emphasize being better. Others may focus on Influence, e.g., ESPN, “The worldwide leader in sports.” Affiliation relates to more charitable organizations, e.g., The American Red Cross, “Together, we can save a life.” (Though even that has some Influence as well.)[x]
Indeed, we often build motivation into our leadership development programs, precisely because it helps people understand individuals and organizations, and how to lead them.
We see motivation as a key factor to understand people, roles, and organizations, and you can see why! This is just a light introduction; to learn more, just drop us a line.
[i] Specific implicit motives have been linked to specific hormones, and, being emotional, are anchored in the “limbic system” common to us and other mammals. See, for example, Schultheiss, O.C. (2013). “The hormonal correlates of implicit motives.” Social & Personality Psychology Compass, Vol. 7, Issue 1, January 2013
[ii] See, for example, McClelland D.C. & Franz, C. E. (2006). “Motivational and other sources of work accomplishments in mid-life: a longitudinal study.” Journal of Personality, April 2006, 60 (4): 679-707.
[iii] First proposed by McClelland, Koestner, and Weinberger (1991) (McClelland, D. C., Koestner, R., & Weinberger, J. (1989) (“How do self-attributed and implicit motives differ?” Psychological Review, 96, 690-702), this was later confirmed through a meta-analysis of data by Spangler (1992): “Validity of questionnaire and TAT measures of need for achievement: Two meta-analyses.” Psychological Bulletin, 112, 140-154.
[iv] Murray, H. A. (1938/2007). Explorations in Personality, 70th Anniversary edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
[v] See, for example, McClelland, D.C. (1961). The Achieving Society. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1961.
[vi] Kelner, S. P., Jr. (1990). Interpersonal Motivation: Positive, Cynical, and Anxious. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston University.
[vii] Winter, D. G. (1973). The power motive. New York: The Free Press.
[viii] Jacobs, Ruth L & McClelland, D.C. (1994). “Moving up the corporate ladder: a longitudinal study of the Leadership Motive Pattern and managerial success in women and men.” Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research. Vol 46(1), 32-41.
[ix] Morgeson, F.P., Campion, M.A., Dipboye, R. L., Hollenbeck, J.R., Murphy, K., Schmitt, N. (2007). “Reconsidering the use of personality tests in personnel selection contexts.” Personnel Psychology, 2007, 60, 683-729.
[x] https://www.sloganlist.com/slogans-list/