Inter-Relationship of Three Measures of Motivation

Abstract

This paper is a progress .report concerning three measures of motivation: (a) Need for Achievement-nAch (McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, & Lowell, 1953), (b) Need for Affiliation-nAff (Shipley & Veroff, 1952), and (c) Need for Power-nPow (Veroff, 1957). Need for achivement refers to a drive to compete satisfactorily with an interiorized standard of excellence; for affiliation has reference to a drive to establish, maintain or restore a warm, reciprocal relationship wich another person; and for power refers to a drive to control the means of influencing another's behavior. Certainly the degree of statistical independence of the needs is an important consideration, particularly if one ultimately aspires to the measurement of a need hierarchy. The three measures were obtained from 416 male Ss over the last four years. Of this number, 215 were students at Darunouth College and 201 were recent members of the U. S. Army. Using a measurement technique, suggested by McClelland, et al. (1952), Ss wrote stories to the following six pictures: two men (inventors) in a shop working at a machine (cf. 2 in the list, Atkinson, 1958, Appendix 111); four men seated at a table with coffee cups-one man is writing on a sheaf of papers (101); man (father) and children seaced at breakfast table (102); man seaced at drafting board before picture of woman and children (28); conference group-seven men variously grouped around a conference table (83); woman in foreground with man standing behind and to the left (103). The Dartmouth stories were scored for the three needs by a person whose scoring reliability, as measured in reference to published expert scoring, had been demonstrated to be .90 for each of the needs. The scoring reliabilities of the Army smdy were .90 for for achievement, .78 for for affiliation, and .82 for for power. An individual's score was determined by adding the scores obtained by E for that particular for S's six stories. Following this summing, each person was characterized by three scores. The distribution of each of the three scores was broken into fourths. The three needs were then compared wich one another by means of three 4 X 4 tables. Table 1 shows the X's that demonstrate the inter-relationships between the scores for each sample.