McLelland found that high-achievement demanders have three main characteristics:
High-achievement demanders like to set moderately challenging goals, do not like to succeed by luck, and do not like to accept tasks that are particularly easy or difficult for them. They are not satisfied with drifting aimlessly and content with the status quo, but always want to make a difference. They always choose their own goals carefully, so they rarely accept that others, including their superiors, automatically choose their own goals. They don't like asking for help or advice from others except experts who can provide the required technology. If they win, they will demand the honor they deserve; If you lose, you have the courage to take responsibility. For example, there are two events that make you choose to roll the dice (the probability of winning is 1/3) or study a problem (the probability of solving the problem is also 1/3). Which one would you choose? High-achievement demanders will choose to study problems, although the probability of winning is the same, and it is much easier to roll dice. People with high demand for achievement like to study and solve problems, rather than relying on opportunities or others to achieve results.
② High achievement demanders will avoid too much difficulty in choosing goals. They like goals with moderate difficulty, which are not easy to get, have no sense of accomplishment and are not rare. They can only rely on luck. They will speculate on the possible extent. Then choose a difficult goal-that is, choose the most difficult challenge to win. For them, when the possibility of success or failure is equal, it is the best opportunity to experience the joy and satisfaction of success from their own struggle.
③ How many tasks do high achievers like that can give immediate feedback? Goals are very important to them, so they want to get timely and clear feedback on their performance, so as to know whether they have made progress. This is also one of the reasons why people with high demand for achievement often choose a professional career, or engage in sales, or participate in business activities.
McLelland pointed out that the impact of financial incentives on high-achievement demanders is complicated. On the one hand, high-achievement demanders often speak highly of their contributions and raise their prices. They are confident, because they know their strengths and weaknesses, so they have confidence in choosing specific jobs. If they work well in the organization and their wages are low, they won't stay in this organization for long. On the other hand, it is hard to say how much financial incentives can improve their performance. Generally speaking, they always work with the highest efficiency, so money is an obvious sign of achievement and ability, but because they feel that it is not worth their efforts, it may cause dissatisfaction.
People with achievement needs have strong requirements for the competence and success of their work, and they are also worried about failure; They are willing and even keen to accept challenges, and often set themselves difficult but not unattainable goals; They dare to take risks, and they can also treat risks with a show attitude. They will never treat the future with superstition and luck, but through careful analysis and estimation. They are willing to take personal responsibility for their work, and hope to get clear and quick feedback on their work. Such people usually don't rest, like to work wholeheartedly for a long time, and get great satisfaction from the completion of their work. Even if they really fail, they won't be too depressed. Generally speaking, they like to express themselves. McLelland believes that if a company has many people with achievement needs, then the company will develop rapidly; If there are many such companies in a country, the economic development speed of the whole country will be higher than the world average. However, in different countries and different cultural backgrounds, the characteristics and manifestations of achievement demand are different, which is not fully expressed by McLelland. The concept of "ability" was first formally put forward by Professor david McLelland of Harvard University in 1973. It refers to the deep-seated characteristics that individuals can distinguish themselves from ordinary people in a certain job. It can be any individual that can be reliably measured or counted, such as motivation, traits, self-image, attitudes or values, knowledge, cognition or behavioral skills in a certain field, and can clearly distinguish outstanding from ordinary performance. However, some scholars define competence from a broader perspective and think that competence includes three dimensions: occupation, behavior and strategic integration. Career dimension refers to the skills to deal with specific daily tasks; Behavior dimension refers to the skills of dealing with non-specific and arbitrary tasks; Strategic comprehensive dimension refers to the management skills combined with organizational situation.
Based on the principles of systematicness, relevance and operability, the so-called competence refers to the objectively measurable individual characteristics and predictable performance-oriented behavior characteristics of excellent students in specific jobs, organizational environment and cultural atmosphere.
From the principles of systematicness, relevance and operability, the characteristic structure of competence includes individual characteristics, behavioral characteristics and working situation conditions.
1, personality characteristics
Individual characteristics-what people can (may) do, that is, the "power" in competence. They show that people's special attributes are a profound and lasting part of one's personality, which determines one's behavior and way of thinking, and can predict various situations or behaviors in work.
Personal characteristics are divided into five levels:
Knowledge (information in a specific field owned by an individual, the ability to discover information, and whether knowledge can guide his behavior);
Skills (the ability to accomplish specific physical or psychological tasks);
Self-concept (personal attitude, values or self-image);
Traits (individual's physiological characteristics and consistent response to situations or information);
Motivation/need (internal motivation of individual behavior).
These five aspects of competency constitute a whole competency structure, in which knowledge and skills are visible and relatively superficial, motivation and characteristics are more hidden, and they are located at the deeper level of personality structure, and self-concept is in between. The superficial knowledge and skills are relatively easy to change and can be developed through training; Self-concept, such as attitude, values and self-confidence, can also be changed through training, but this kind of training is more difficult than the training of knowledge and skills; The core motivation and characteristics are in the deepest part of personality structure, which is difficult to cultivate and develop.
The above characteristics are often described as an iceberg floating in the water, in which knowledge and skills are visible, relatively superficial and dominant personal characteristics, floating on the water; Self-concept, characteristics, motivation/need are hidden, deep and core parts of personality, hidden underwater, and implicit characteristics are the key factors to determine people's behavior. McLelland believes that the water iceberg (knowledge and skills) is a benchmark feature and a requirement for the basic quality of competent people, but it cannot accurately distinguish those who perform well from those who perform poorly. Underwater icebergs can be collectively called features, which are the key factors to distinguish excellent from ordinary. But there is an interactive relationship between different levels of personal characteristics.
2. Behavior characteristics
Behavioral characteristics-what people do. It can be regarded as the concrete application of knowledge, skills, attitude and motivation in a specific situation. There is reason to believe that this behavior feature may be repeated in similar situations. The behavioral characteristics related to competence refer to the key behaviors that can achieve excellent performance in similar situations.
3. Situational conditions
Situational conditions-ability is embodied in a specific work situation. It is found that the competency models of different posts, different industries and different cultural environments are different, which requires us to put the concept of competency in the framework of matching people, posts and organizations. First, "Type A Motivation" and its personality characteristics
People in the world can generally be divided into two categories psychologically: a small number of people are willing to seek opportunities and challenges and are willing to strive for satisfactory achievements; A large number of people are indifferent to this.
For many years, psychologists have been trying to explain such an interesting question: Is a sense of accomplishment an accidental idea? Is this pure motivation (for example, accumulating wealth, power and reputation) or compound motivation (for self-realization)? Most importantly, can a sense of accomplishment be cultivated in some way?
A few years ago, psychologists made a detailed investigation of 450 unemployed workers in a factory in Erie, Pennsylvania. The results show that most unemployed workers rest at home for a while, and then register with the General Administration of Employment to see if their previous jobs or similar jobs are recruiting people. However, a few people have made different choices: since the day they lost their jobs, they have been moving around and actively looking for jobs. They carefully read the job advertisements in newspapers and sought help from trade unions, churches and various brothels everywhere; They also attend training courses to learn new vocational skills to expand their job search opportunities; They even left their hometown to look for jobs elsewhere. On the contrary, some people don't want to leave Yili town even if they have jobs in other places.
The above two kinds of people with completely different behaviors live in roughly the same environment: short unemployment time, urgent need for work and lack of living security. However, the reality is that only a few people take the initiative to fight for it, but most people would rather endure unemployment than make great efforts to find a way out for themselves. After years of observation and research, psychologists have come to the conclusion that the specific human motives shown by these few people are much stronger than others. They call this kind of motivation "type A motivation", which represents some very important personality characteristics in human nature.
People with type A motivation have three personality characteristics:
1, likes to set challenging goals.
I like to solve problems through my own efforts, rather than relying on accidental opportunities or enjoying success.
3, require immediate feedback, find out the work results.
Second, the achievement needs and incentive theory
People with strong type A motivation do this because they will consider how to do things better and more satisfactorily as soon as they have time. People who often consider doing things better obviously have a strong sense of accomplishment, so they will actively look for jobs and set challenging goals. They don't like to take chances, they like to experience the joy of success from their own efforts, and they are willing to work to improve their effectiveness and see results soon.
Why do these people often think of doing things better? Facts have proved that this idea is not innate, but the result of cultivation. For example, parents set moderate achievement goals for their children at home, and enthusiastically encourage and help their children to achieve such goals, so that children can establish the view that they dare to accept challenges and strive to achieve their goals from an early age.
People who have achieved success, the joy, excitement and sense of accomplishment brought by success will become the source of positive motivation.
It is not a simple matter to distinguish what kind of needs and motives a person belongs to. Because the judgments made according to common sense are often inaccurate, and the parties' own confessions are not necessarily credible. For example, a general said that his strongest desire was to win the war, and a manager said that he was only interested in the company's profits ... but after careful verification, you will find that the above confession may not reflect the actual situation, and these people may really care about something completely different, which is the so-called "hidden" need, which is also the so-called "hidden" motivation.
The demand for achievement can cultivate people with entrepreneurial spirit, whether they are trade union leaders or business managers, Republicans or Democrats, Catholics or Buddhists, capitalists or producers. People who need strong achievements can often achieve great achievements. For a company, if there are many such people in the staff, then the company will operate well and develop rapidly. For a country, with the rapid development of enterprises, the whole national economy will also develop. Because of this, people find that the more a country's popular publications (such as children's textbooks) and pop songs involve a sense of accomplishment, the faster the country's economic growth will be. The correlation between the two shows that if a country always thinks about how to do things better, it will actually achieve greater economic achievements.
Third, cultivate a sense of accomplishment.
It is not enough to realize the importance of strong demand for achievement to individuals and countries. The key is to find ways to cultivate the sense of accomplishment of the people and the country. From 1960, under the leadership of McLelland, a group of psychologists conducted a lot of experiments in Harvard University with enterprise managers as the main research object, and created a so-called "full pressure" training class to improve the achievement needs of participants.
At first, these psychologists had no confidence in the success of the experiment, because at that time, American psychologists generally believed that people's basic motives were formed in childhood, and it was difficult to change them later. Many psychological counseling and psychotherapy had no significant effect on changing people's personality.
McLelland set the following four main goals for business managers:
1, through training, let participants learn to think, speak and act in a way that people with a strong sense of accomplishment are used to;
2. Encourage participants to set high and thoughtful goals for the next two years;
3. Use various methods to make participants know themselves better, such as explaining their behavior to the group and analyzing their psychology and motivation, so as to break their inherent habits and attitudes and re-recognize their goals.
4. Through communication, we can understand the hopes of others, share successes and failures with each other, and touch feelings with the same experience through experiments that completely change the surrounding environment, so that participants can enhance their collective consciousness and spirit.
This kind of training course has been held for many times among managers of big American companies, Mexican companies and Indian companies. Statistics show that the results of trained people after two years are obviously higher than those of untrained people under the same conditions, because the initiative and entrepreneurial spirit of the former have generally improved.