David mcclelland (David C. McClelland1917.05.20-1998.03.27), an American social psychologist, won the Outstanding Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association 65438-0987. He was born in Mount Vernon, New York, and died of heart failure in Lexington, Massachusetts.

1938 received a bachelor's degree in psychology from westling university, 1939 received a master's degree in psychology from Missouri university, and 194 1 received a doctorate in psychology from Yale university. Later, he was a lecturer at Connecticut Women's University, a professor at Wesleyan University and a professor at Brynmore College. 1956 began to be a professor of psychology at Harvard University, 1987 transferred to Boston University until his retirement. 1963 founded Macbeth Consulting Co., Ltd., which is a company specializing in assisting managers' evaluation and staff training. In the same year, he submitted to the International Education Association a plan to set up seven-level academic scholarships in colleges and universities, aiming at stimulating students' learning motivation. He published a paper in American Psychologist, pointing out the weaknesses and shortcomings of IQ and personality tests commonly used to select qualified employees in recruitment. He believes that enterprise recruitment should be based on the investigation of the quality of candidates in related fields and adopt the SAT test method. His ideas, once considered too radical, have been widely adopted by the business community.

McLelland was very interested in social motivation in his early years and developed the expectation theory. He created the technique of measuring achievement and made a deep study of achievement motivation. He is an authoritative psychologist who studies motivation in contemporary times, and is famous for his three kinds of needs theory. In addition, he also made other contributions, including the difference hypothesis and the study of biological adaptability. From 1940s to 1950s, he began to study people's needs and motivations, put forward the famous theory of three needs, and drew a series of important research conclusions. Before McLelland, psychologists of psychoanalysis and behaviorism studied motivation. The psychoanalytic school represented by Freud used the methods of dream interpretation and free association to study motivation. They often attribute human behavior to sexual and instinctive motives, and their research methods and techniques are difficult to produce representative results and have poor repeatability, so they cannot obtain the intensity of motivation. Behaviorists use experimental methods to study motivation, so that the intensity of motivation can be measured. However, they use motivation experiments to study motivation, and the definition of motivation is too narrow, mainly focusing on basic survival needs such as hunger, thirst and pain, without distinguishing between human motivation and animal motivation. McLelland thinks that their research on motivation has some limitations. He pays attention to the study of people's high-level needs and social motives, emphasizes the use of systematic, objective and effective methods for research, and puts forward three important needs of individuals in the work situation:

1. Achievement needs: the need to strive for success and hope to do the best. McLelland believes that people who have a strong need for achievement are eager to do things more perfectly, improve work efficiency and achieve greater success. What they pursue is the pleasure of overcoming difficulties, solving problems and working hard in the process of striving for success, as well as the sense of personal accomplishment after success. They don't pay attention to the material rewards of success. People who need high achievements are enterprising, enterprising, adventurous and pragmatic, and most of them are enterprising realists.

2. The need for authority and power: the need to influence or control others without being controlled by others. Different people have different degrees of desire for power. People who need higher power like to dominate and influence others, like to "give orders" to others, and pay attention to striving for status and influence. They like competitive occasions or occasions that can reflect their high status, and they will also pursue outstanding achievements, but they do so not for personal accomplishment like people who need high achievements, but to obtain status and power commensurate with their existing power and status. The demand for power is one of the basic elements of successful management.

3. Affinity needs: the need to establish friendly and intimate interpersonal relationships, that is, the desire to be loved and accepted by others. People with high affinity and need are more inclined to associate with others, at least for the sake of others, which will bring him pleasure. People with high affinity and demand are eager for friendship, prefer a working environment of cooperation rather than competition, and hope to communicate and understand each other. They are more sensitive to interpersonal relationships in the environment. Sometimes, the demand for affinity is also manifested in fear of losing some intimate relationships and avoiding interpersonal conflicts. Affinity is an important condition for maintaining social communication and interpersonal harmony.

H Murray is the first psychologist who systematically put forward the concept of achievement demand (1938). He defined the need for achievement as an individual "completing difficult work; Manipulate or organize things, people or ideas; In order to complete independently as soon as possible; In order to overcome obstacles and reach high standards; Transcend oneself; Transcend and surpass others; And hope to enhance the self-esteem of individual talents through successful study. To put it simply, Murray believes that achievement demand refers to an individual's desire or tendency to do things well as soon as possible. Under the influence of Murray's needs theory, McLelland and J. Atkinson began to conduct a series of studies systematically (1953). They believe that the demand for achievement is a fairly persistent and stable characteristic of personal personality, and this characteristic or tendency of pursuing a certain purpose or goal is achievement motivation. When the characteristics or news of an individual's situation are related to motivation, then the characteristics or news of the situation constitute clues, which will stimulate the individual's expectation of achieving the goal. McLelland further defined achievement motivation as "the impulse or desire of individuals to compete with their own good or excellent standards when doing things". They believe that the pursuit of achievement inspired by achievement motivation is the result of two opposite psychological needs. One of them is the need to achieve, and the other is the need to avoid failure. Only when the former demand is greater than the latter demand will there be an individual's pursuit of achievement.

McLelland uses thematic apperception test to measure personal motivation. He revised Murray's thematic apperception test to enhance its objectivity and make it suitable for group tests. For example, use a projector to present a picture to a group of subjects and let them write a story according to the picture; Sometimes sentences are used instead of pictures. McLelland and his colleagues combined experimental methods with thematic apperception tests. First of all, they aroused the motivation they wanted to measure through experiments, and then in the story of thematic apperception test, they saw the influence of experimental arousal motivation on the story content. McLelland did not use a clinical scoring system like Murray's, but adopted a simplified scoring method, that is, the characteristics of stories were divided into several categories to see whether the characteristics of each category appeared in the subjects' stories. This method makes the score more systematic and objective, but it ignores some complex features in the story. McLelland thinks that the method of thematic apperception test and questionnaire survey are two basically different personality characteristics. The questionnaire method measures the cognition of the subjects, not their self-engine. Therefore, he thinks that the method of thematic apperception test is more suitable for measuring implicit and subconscious motives. It can be seen that McLelland's contribution lies not only in putting forward an important motivation theory, but also in developing the methods of studying and measuring motivation.

At the end of 1960s, the research team led by McLelland found that the traditional evaluation of academic ability and knowledge and skills could not predict the level of job performance and personal career success. Moreover, the above evaluation methods are usually unfair to ethnic minorities, women and the lower classes. At the same time, they found that what fundamentally affects personal performance is what can be called competence, such as achievement motivation, interpersonal understanding and team influence. The team further defined it as "personal characteristics that can distinguish performance levels in a specific work and organizational environment." From 65438 to 0973, McLelland published an article entitled "Measuring Talent, Not Intelligence", which laid the foundation for the birth of the theory of talent. In order to identify and evaluate talents, McLelland created "Bevaivoral Event Interview". Behavioral event interviews were first adopted by a project to select diplomatic information officers (FSIO) for the US government. In the early 1970s, a management consulting company in McLelland received a request from the US government for help in choosing FISO. FISO's mission is to publicize American foreign policy through library management, diplomatic and cultural activities, and speeches and dialogues with local people, so that more people can understand and like the United States. To become an FSIO, you have to pass a very strict exam, which is called "Diplomat Exam". The key evaluation contents are: a. IQ; B. academic qualifications, diplomas and grades; C general humanistic knowledge and related cultural background knowledge, including American history, western culture, English, politics, economy and other professional knowledge.

Because the examination requires a strong knowledge of cultural background, ethnic minorities from non-mainstream cultural backgrounds and other groups have lost their competitive advantage. Before 1970, FSIO was basically male and white. However, practice has proved that many people are not qualified for their jobs in carefully selected FSIO. This is why the government turned to McLelland. He used comparative analysis to find reasonable and correct selection criteria. The specific steps are as follows: First, find out the best FISO and general competent personnel, and divide them into excellent and applicable groups. With the help of behavioral event interviews, he specifically communicated with them and summarized the differences in behaviors and ways of thinking between excellent and applicable people. Practice has proved that this method is very effective. Generally speaking, the characteristics of excellent people can't be found in candidates, which is exactly what the research team needs to call "encodable" information. By classifying and grading these traits according to specific principles, the research team finally got a trait system that reflects the difference between Excellence and mediocrity, which is the prototype of today's competency model. There are three core talents in the FSIO talent model established by McLelland for the US government:

1, cross-cultural interpersonal sensitivity: the ability to deeply understand different cultures, accurately understand the words and deeds of others in different cultural backgrounds, and clarify the mindset that may be brought about by one's own cultural background.

2. Positive expectations of others: respect the dignity and value of others, and maintain positive expectations of others even under pressure.

3. Quickly enter the local political network: the ability to quickly understand the local interpersonal network and the political inclination of relevant personnel.

Later facts fully proved that it was wise to choose FISO on the basis of talent. Although it has been constantly revised and "upgraded", until today, the US government still regards these three abilities as the main basis for choosing FISO.