[Fighting the “Epidemic” Reasoning] McClelland’s Theory and the Cultivation of High Achievement Needs of Enterprise Employees after the Epidemic
Hao Xuguang
(Source: China Social Sciences Network 2020-04-14)
The COVID-19 epidemic has had a profound impact on companies and even employee behavior. After the epidemic, companies are more hungry for employees with high achievement needs. Meeting and cultivating employees' high achievement needs is crucial to improving the company's competitive advantage.
1. Employees’ achievements need to be improved after the epidemic
The outbreak of the new coronavirus pneumonia epidemic has impacted many companies, and the enthusiasm of employees has also been greatly affected. The author conducted interviews with 6 senior managers of manufacturing companies of different sizes and 132 general employees from different industries. Among them, senior managers unanimously believe that employees' current dominant needs are safety needs, and some current management measures are more focused on employees' peace of mind and recognition. Ordinary employees also generally stated that the main issues currently being considered are survival and safety, and work is more about supporting their families. I don’t think much about whether I want to do a better job and become the best among my peers. It can be seen that the dominant need of employees during the epidemic is safety needs rather than achievement needs. However, in the face of the impact of the epidemic, companies have lost more than one month of working hours compared to previous years. Therefore, after resuming work, they hope that employees can devote themselves to work with greater enthusiasm and do their work better. At present, the risk of overseas importation of the epidemic is still high, and society and enterprises are facing the dual pressure of epidemic prevention and control and production promotion. In the face of complex tasks and uncertain environments, it is even more necessary to improve employees' achievement needs so that they can exert their enthusiasm and initiative. Therefore, how to effectively mobilize the enthusiasm of employees and enable them to pursue excellence is an issue that needs to be solved urgently.
2. McClelland and his three needs theory
McClelland’s three needs theory may provide managers with some useful inspiration on how to improve employees’ achievement needs. In 1955, McClelland challenged the universality and applicability of Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory and expressed doubts about whether the core concept of the theory, "self-actualization", had sufficient basis. He believes that people's social needs are not innate, but learned, derived from environment, experience and education (learned). Especially when a specific behavior is rewarded, that behavior pattern will be strengthened and a need tendency will be formed. McClelland and others used psychological methods such as thematic apperception test to conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis, and concluded that there are three major categories of social needs: the need for achievement, the need for power, and the need for (social) communication (also known as affinity needs). McClelland paid more attention to the need for high achievement.
(1) Need for high achievement
People with high need for achievement have strong requirements for work, like to work long hours, and like to express themselves. It is characterized by transcendence, innovation, strong ambition, pursuit of excellence and distinction, and a strong internal drive to meet standards and strive for success. If given the power to independently determine work goals, people with a high need for achievement will always choose tasks of moderate difficulty. In this way, you can pursue excellence and difference without trying your luck. For example, in a ring game, they may only participate if there is more than a one-third chance of success. And people with a high need for achievement will only act this way if they can influence the final outcome through their work. They don't like to rely on luck or chance to achieve results, and they don't like gambling. If they were given a choice between throwing a dice and solving a problem, even though the chance of success was 1:3, these people would definitely choose to solve the problem. They value personal achievement rather than success or compensation per se. They want to do things better. This leads to another personality trait: the desire to receive immediate, concrete feedback on the results of one's work. Therefore, they prefer to be salesmen rather than teachers, because the latter's work will take many years to bear fruit.
(2) Need for power
The need for high power manifests itself as the need to influence others to behave in certain ways rather than in other ways. People with a high need for power like to pursue leadership positions, often like to control others, and exert influence on others. They are often argumentative, talkative, straightforward, and calm-minded. They are good at asking questions and requests. They like to teach others and are willing to give speeches. They like to compete, dare to take responsibility, and establish prestige. They value influencing, persuading, and controlling others. Therefore, they also like to pursue jobs that can be valued by others and a competitive work environment. Because they are particularly concerned with gaining authority and exerting influence and control over others, they place relatively little emphasis on effective performance.
(3) Affinity needs
The need for affiliation, also known as the need for belonging and social need, is a desire or drive to be liked and accepted by others. As individuals, they tend to pay more attention to maintaining a harmonious social relationship and get satisfaction from the social interaction of friendship and friendship; they have a strong desire for friendship, unity, social interaction, and the desire to establish and maintain harmonious, harmonious, friendly and close interpersonal relationships. Affinity needs and affinity are not the same concept. People with a high need to belong tend to prefer cooperative rather than competitive jobs.
3. Meeting employees’ achievement needs: a preliminary application of McClelland’s achievement needs
(1) Fully understand the importance of meeting achievement needs
In organizations, many managers and business leaders have a high need for achievement to succeed. When employees with a strong need for achievement are asked to engage in a difficult job, the challenge of the task itself becomes an internal inducement to stimulate the need for high achievement, which ultimately leads to the pursuit of excellence. The more employees in an organization who have this need for high achievement, the more competitive the organization will be. Therefore, achievement needs are also particularly important for job design in organizations. For employees with a high need for achievement, increasing job diversity, autonomy and responsibility at work will obviously make them perform better; for employees with a low need for achievement, increasing personal responsibilities at work will make them feel frustrated and affect individual confidence and motivation. Most of them are willing to engage in routine and transactional work. Therefore, for people with high achievement needs, the focus is on satisfying their achievement needs.
(2) Let employees have a certain degree of autonomy over their work
The first characteristic of high-achieving employees: they hope to have some control over the results of their work through their own efforts, and are strongly required to take personal responsibility for finding solutions to problems. Managers should focus on the following three aspects.
1． Know people well. Putting the right person in the right position is more conducive to giving him a sense of control and helping him to exert his enthusiasm. Letting a person do what he is best at and most willing to do can give employees an invisible sense of control, participation and motivation in their work.
2． Make work meaningful. Employees should be made to realize that people can not only support their families and create value for society through work, but also display their potential talents through work. This is the meaning of work itself. On this basis, we should appropriately adjust the division of labor and enrich the work content so that employees can take charge of their work and make their work meaningful and valuable. There is a certain degree of autonomy in work, indicating that employees are responsible for the work they do.
3. Participate in management with appropriate delegation. To improve employees' work autonomy and allow them to have a certain degree of autonomy over their own work, we must consider participating in management. Allowing employees to participate in some decisions of the company can enhance employees' identification with the company and its goals, and make them feel responsible and obligated to work hard to achieve this goal. It can also enhance employees' confidence and make them feel that they are important rather than dispensable, thereby increasing their enthusiasm. Under what conditions is a person most motivated to work? The answer is under the conditions of authorization. A certain degree of authorization is conducive to increasing the degree of control employees have over their own work. Giving employees the right to handle their own work is a sign of respect for people and an important aspect of giving people a sense of accomplishment.
(3) Set reasonable goals together
Regarding the second characteristic of high achievement needs, they tend to set goals with certain difficulty and are willing to take predicted risks. Managers should pay attention to the motivation, guidance, and focusing functions of goals. Since people with high achievement needs do not want to take excessive risks or be overly conservative based on what they can control, but take moderate risks. Then, the tasks and goals set for him should be achievable through hard work, rather than easy or difficult to achieve. Goals need to be challenging and inherently attractive. If goals are too high and too difficult, it will lower their level of achievement.
(4) Timely feedback
Since high achievers require immediate feedback on completing tasks, managers should pay attention to feedback at work. For employees with a high need for achievement, what they pursue is not success itself or compensation, but excellence in work, and timely feedback is actually a kind of motivation. Because we strive for excellence and want to have some control over our work, it is natural to ask for immediate feedback. The purpose of feedback is to let employees understand how their work is progressing, how consistent it is with the organization's goals, and how they can improve in the future.
Through feedback, employees can know their current status and the gap between their goals, which is an important aspect to improve their sense of accomplishment. Timely feedback also provides employees with an important message: the goal can be achieved, which gives people the motivation to continue working hard. Timely feedback can return the initiative in work to employees, and employees not only experience a certain degree of freedom of movement during the work process. And adequate response to work performance also facilitates employees to make adjustments and improvements based on feedback at any time.
4. Cultivating employees’ high achievement needs: further application of McClelland’s achievement needs
(1) Achievement needs can be cultivated
McClelland's achievement needs theory believes that achievement training can improve a person's achievement needs by training a person to think in terms of achievement, victory, and success, and help them learn how to act in the manner of a high achiever by seeking an environment with personal responsibility, feedback, and moderate risk-taking to change their achievement needs. So, if the job itself requires high achievers, managers can either select people with high achievement needs or develop candidates through achievement training. This item is very important because it can be cultivated, so the company has the initiative and can take measures to train existing employees and improve their motivation to pursue excellence.
(2) The practice of cultivating employees’ needs for achievement
1. Specific methods. Cultivating employees' achievement needs is more difficult than meeting employees' achievement needs, and some new methods are needed. According to McClelland's research, managers should try to encourage and teach employees to think, communicate, and work in the ways that high-achieving people do. Encourage employees to set goals for the next one or two years that are relatively high but can be achieved after careful consideration and hard work. Managers should participate in the formulation of these goals with employees. Employees themselves should have a clear commitment to the goals and make sure to jointly check the achievement of goals every six months. Use various methods to allow subordinates to better understand themselves, think about how they can better explain their behaviors to the group, and allow subordinates and managers to jointly analyze their psychology and motivations, thereby breaking their original habits and methods and re-recognizing their own achievement needs. By understanding each other's hopes and sharing experiences and lessons learned from successes and failures, subordinates can enhance their sense of community.
2. Create an atmosphere where employees strive for excellence. To cultivate employees' achievement needs, managers should create an atmosphere and habits that allow everyone to strive for excellence. For example, managers can establish a sound learning system in the company, develop learning plans for employees, and occasionally hire external consulting agencies and university professors to provide various levels of training to the company. During the epidemic isolation period, employees can be required to self-study and conduct online training. These learning and training tasks may not necessarily bring immediate visible direct economic benefits, but they create a learning, progress, and positive atmosphere in the enterprise.
3． To cultivate the needs for high achievement, we should "teach students in accordance with their aptitude" and "make good use of them according to their needs". People with high achievement needs may be entrepreneurs or senior managers, or they may be business experts or technical backbones. For the definition and evaluation of people with high achievement needs, a single "one size fits all" standard cannot be adopted. A person with a high need for achievement may not necessarily be a good manager. Especially in a large organization, high-achievement people are interested in how they can do well personally, not in how they can influence others to do better. For example, a salesperson with a high need for achievement may not necessarily be a good sales manager, and an excellent general manager may not necessarily be a person with a need for high achievement.
5. Conclusion
To satisfy and cultivate the high achievements of employees, we need to find ways to provide jobs that are challenging and can bring a sense of achievement to individuals, so that they have a certain degree of autonomy, try to involve employees and have a certain degree of authorization, and provide them with timely information feedback during the work process so that they can understand where they have made progress or breakthroughs to enhance their need for greater achievements. Recognize their achievements and make them willing to take on heavy responsibilities to encourage more results and create a positive atmosphere.
(Author’s affiliation: w88 casino of International Business, w88 casino)
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