Inspiring through Implicit Motivation
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Implicit Motivation and Inspiring Action
A classic difference between managers and leaders is that leaders inspire. Inspiration demands that you tap into people’s emotions – and whether one person or many, everyone possesses different needs, backgrounds, and cultures. The higher level the leader, the more likely that they have to tap into the emotions of many people they have never met. How is this possible?
By understanding implicit motivation, leaders can engage with diverse individuals for organizational impact, by identifying why people do what they do in emotional as well as logical terms. We’ve discussed the three implicit motives on this blog before, but it helps to understand not only what they are, but why they do what they do.
What are implicit motives?
Implicit motives are deep, stable emotional drives that energize, select, and direct behavior[1]. Decades of research[2] show that just three of the commonest motives account for 85% of daily thinking time. Training in Implicit Motivation, makes it possible to recognize a core pattern of drivers for enduring patterns of behavior of individuals, teams, and organizations. Because implicit motives provide the emotional “fuel” for behavior, are not conscious, and have great stability over time[3], implicit motives become particularly valuable to understand and connect with people generally. While people express their conscious values (what they consider important) readily and accurately, the more hidden implicit motives determine where people get their true enjoyment, satisfaction, or frustration (when blocked) over time and across settings.
Implicit motives thus also predict a range of results, e.g.: leadership effectiveness and career outcomes[4], team orientation[5], innovative and energizing work climates[6], cultural norms[7],[8], and even health issues such as blood pressure[9], immune system function[10], and addiction[11]. Importantly, across numerous studies, they show no gender bias[12], or detrimental ethnic bias[13].
What are the key three?
Everyone has all three primary motives, but at different levels, providing a stable, individual “motive profile.” Prominent motives tend to drive consistent patterns of behavior, expressed differently in different individuals. The three commonest motives are defined as follows:
Achievement (Efficiency or Innovation): Meeting or exceeding a standard of excellence and/or improving; doing better
Affiliation (Interpersonal relationship(s)): Establishing, maintaining, or restoring close, friendly relationships
Influence (Impact and influence): Making an impact on or influencing others
People with different motives can create unintended conflict: e.g., Achievement-driven experts want to solve problems, but may not consider the impact on others. Likewise, Influence-driven managers may think more about political concerns than efficiency. Since motives are emotional, people may assume that what feels right, is right, and fail to realize others’ different assumptions. But with only three, people can readily learn better – and apply this learning to engage with people and anticipate their reactions. The interactions between the three, and how they are expressed, can be quite rich, but we’re still talking a simple starting place, and people we have taught use the framework in many ways over time in professional and personal lives.
Patterns of implicit motives often emerge in organizations as well, as firms will typically build cultures around the motives aligned with their purpose and their leaders. For example, many consulting firms show high Achievement and Affiliation motives, in a pattern of “friendly entrepreneurship.” This profile at its best encourages individual goal achievement, and holds people together in an organization because they like belonging. Like all cultures, this can also have negatives, e.g., a high burnout rate or conflict-aversion. By contrast, market-based companies may have a stronger Influence motive culture, with everyone being highly alert to how they present to others. One well-known soft-drink company used to be famous for its executive presentations, which sometimes took months and dozens of professionals to build them to meet their extremely high standards for dramatic impact. The potential negatives here is being caught up in political struggles or spending too much time on presentation rather than results.
Since motives relate to emotional satisfaction, those who can connect with and call on them can build stronger emotional commitment to a purpose, goal, or task at multiple levels:
· Leaders can engage and inspire their team to work together for a common purpose.
· Organizations can create a positive work culture that drives their strategy.
· Change agents can connect authentically across diverse people, groups, and cultures.
Appealing to and inspiring everyone – whether employees or clients – means you must know what moves them. Implicit motivation is readily-learnable tool to help leaders do just that.
[1] See, for example, McClelland, D.C. (1998/2014) Human Motivation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
[2] Harvard professor Henry Murray introduced the modern concept of implicit motivation and how to measure it in 1938. David McClelland and John Atkinson refined it and identified the three key motives, and their students (including the author) have continued to advance the field ever since.
[3] Franz, C. E., McClelland, D. C., & Weinberger, J. (1991). Childhood antecedents of conventional social accomplishment in midlife adults: A 36-year prospective study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(4), 586–595.
[4] McClelland, D.C. & Burnham, D. (1973/2003). “Power Is the Great Motivator.” Harvard Business Review, reprint January 2003
[5] Kelner, S. P., Jr. (1990). Interpersonal Motivation: Positive, Cynical, and Anxious. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston University, followed up in several client projects.
[6] Spreier, S., Fontaine, M. & Malloy, R.L. (2006). “Leadership Run Amok.” Harvard Business Review, June 2006
[7] McClelland, D. C. (1975). Power: The Inner Experience. New York: Free Press.
[8] McClelland, D. C. (1961). The Achieving Society. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand.
[9] McClelland, D. C. (1979). Inhibited power motivation and high blood pressure in men. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 88, #2, 182-190
[10] McKay, J. R. (1987a). Trust vs. cynicism: The relationship of affiliative orientation to immunocompetence and illness frequency. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University
[11] McClelland, D. C., Davis, W. N., Kalin, R., and Wanner, E. (1972). The drinking man. New York: The Free Press.
[12] Jacobs, R.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.
[13] Since cultures have been shown to reinforce motives across a population, countries may differ from each other in terms of overall motive pattern, but within a given culture, we see no ethnic differentiation, e.g., by race. All three motives are present in all cultures, and the outcomes of motives are comparable regardless of culture or country.