The 3 Types of Motivation: Power, Achievement, and Affiliation

There are three basic types of motivation that explain why we do what we do, when we do it.

Hello friends!

One of the most fundamental questions in psychology is: why do people do what they do? Or, more specifically: Why do people do what they do and when they do it? Evidently, we can include ourselves in the equation:

– Why do I do what I do the way I do?

To answer this question, several psychological and psychiatric theories have been created. The “cause” of behavior was placed in genetics. After all, we do what we do because we belong to a species (which gives us certain characteristics and possibilities). The “cause” was placed in the environment. For example, we talk about one topic with friends and we talk about other topics with relatives. The “cause” was also brought inside the psyche: conscious and unconscious desires in psychoanalysis, physiological and psychological needs in humanism, history of reinforcement in behavioral.

They are competing theories that seek to explain everything from a simple act like lighting a cigarette to choosing a profession.

For David C. McClelland we can distinguish 3 Types of Motivation: the need to accomplish, the need for power and the need to affiliate.

The 3 Types of Motivation: Power, Achievement, and Affiliation

McClellan, an American psychologist, argued that our motivations are unconscious, that is, if we investigate our ultimate motives, we will not always know why we do the things we do.

This unconsciousness is unimportant if we think about why we choose a movie to watch at the weekend and not another, but it is totally important if we stop to think about the moments of big decisions such as choosing a college, changing careers, starting a relationship or joining a religious practice.

Evaluating especially candidates and workers in companies and industries, McClelland came to the conclusion that there are 3 types of motivation:

1) Achievement Motivation: the desire to improve and do an activity in the best possible way;

2) Power Motivation: the desire to obtain and exert influence in interpersonal relationships;

3) Affiliation Motivation: the desire to feel integrated in a group, the desire to belong.

As people are generally unaware of such motivations, the tests used for personnel selection fail to capture real motivations and trends. Therefore, McClelland believed that the use of the “Thematic Apperception Test” (TAT) would be more appropriate.

The application of the test, as with all psychological tests, is restricted to psychologists. The test summary says:

“The TAT is considered a projective technique that consists of presenting a series of boards, selected by the examiner, to the subject, who must tell a story about each of the boards. Frequently obtained stories reveal important components of personality, which are due to two psychological tendencies according to Murray’s theory. The first is people’s tendency to interpret an ambiguous human situation based on their past experiences and present yearnings. The second is the inclination of people who write stories to act in a similar way to use the storehouses of their experiences and express their conscious and unconscious feelings and needs. The application is individual and can be applied to people aged between 14 and 40 years”.

That is, from the projections of the stories, the candidate for a job could truly express his real motivations.

Although this type of application was carried out by McClelland and his consulting team, the application of the TAT in the corporate environment was not as successful due to the complications of interpretation and even the correction time.

But going back to McClelland’s theory, we can easily see that, although we may not confess it, our motivations revolve around these 3 basic motives:

1) we want to do what we do better (and therefore receive approval);

2) we want to influence others in what we believe is the best thing to do;

3) we want to feel that we belong to a group (larger or smaller) and that our individual existence has a social meaning.

For example, if we use psychology’s key question: why does a person do X?

Why does a person adhere to a religion?

According to McClelland’s theory, a person may want to improve. Improve your behavior, do the things considered right – leave a life of mistakes, lies, addictions, conflicts – and start acting with what is demarcated as morally correct. You can join a religion to feel immersed in a group, have people you trust like a brotherhood or brotherhood, and you can embrace a belief in order to influence other people’s behavior, defending the positions you think are right (and usually having an “enemy” to fight).

Conclusion

There are, therefore, three basic types of motivation that we can find in the so-called big choices. Despite the idea that motivations are unconscious – and therefore, their origins are somewhat unknown – McClelland’s theory helps us to understand our behavior and the behavior of other people.

The tendency is for motivation to tend towards one of these three options. In other words, the reason that leads us to perform an action remains constant over time and even in choices that change the course, the same motivation will be predominant.

That is to say, someone who is motivated by power will maintain this motivation even if he changes jobs or creates another company. A person who wants to improve and fulfill himself will keep this motivation either to swim better or to play the harp afterwards. And, likewise, it happens with the affiliation motivation: belonging to a family, a group of friends, a community, a belief or a group on Facebook.

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