6. ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION. What is it that causes some people to be highly motivated to perform well when assigned a task? What is it about them that makes them willing to undertake the behaviors necessary designed to achieve a task-success experience and others are not? Questions such as these are at the core of the study of achievement motivational processes. Psychologists interested in mental health and life satisfaction find that for individual human beings, the act of achieving is highly important for satisfaction with the self (Korman, 1971b). Knowing what conditions determine the arousal and direction of behaviors for these achievement-seeking individuals, permits psychologists and educators to plan for a therapeutic and educational interventions and increase the likelihood of life achievement (Aronson and Carlsmith, 1962). Cognitive dissonance research provided one bit of evidence for the fruitfulness of the consistency rationale in understanding some of the conditions that lead to achievement motivation. Some general research findings supported this position. Adams and Rosenbaum (1962) found that when a person is paid by piecework, his productivity will be greater when he perceives his piecework rate is deserved than when he feels it is not deserved. Adams and Jacobsen (1964) studied subjects who, not believing that they had the qualifications to earn a given piecework rate, produced better quality and less quantity work than those individuals who perceived they had the qualifications to earn a given piecework rate. Denmark and Guttentag (1967) discovered that women with self-esteem who want to go to college are more likely to engage in behaviors designed to achieve that goal than women who want to go to college who have low self- esteem. Andrews (1967) showed that subjects who perceive that they are getting a higher piecework rate than they deserve, based upon previous experience, decrease their performance, while individuals getting less than they perceive they deserve increase their performance. Aronson, Carlsmith, and Darley (1963) found that people who expect that they will have to do something unpleasant on the basis of previous experience choose to perform the unpleasant task, even when they could have chosen a more pleasant one. Walster, Aronson, and Brown (1966) and Rosekraus (1967) studied people who anticipated an unpleasant experience voluntarily and found that they endured more shock than those anticipating a pleasant or unspecified experience. In western civilizations, it is common to hear the argument that people are motivated to achieve as a function of the value the human being expects to obtain by this behavior. This is nothing more or less than the application of the expectancy-value framework. The acceptance of the expectancy-value approach to achievement motivation is so embedded within human beings that it provides the theoretical basis upon which most of the administrative practices commonly found in formal organizations are traditionally founded. In organizations the controlling influence, usually the administration, decides that there are certain gratifications that most people want from school and/or their jobs which the administration controls. The administration controls and increases achievement by making the attainment of these rewards contingent upon effective performance. The promise of such value attainment will result in increased performance. The possible outcomes will serve as incentives for better performance provided the individual involved believes the rewards actually are attainable on the basis of his efforts. If he believes that such rewards are not contingent on his performance, he will not react to them as incentives. Lawler and Porter (1967) studied this type of expectancy- value approach in work achievement. Their hypothesis was that the amount of effort a person expended on his job (as judged by his superior or peers) was related to the extent to which he perceived he could achieve desired outcomes by engaging in such effort. A number of studies showed similar results (Georgopoulos, Mahone, and Jones, 1957; Hackman and Porter, 1968; Gailbreath and Cummings, 1967; Goodman, Rose, and Furcon, 1970). It was generally concluded that the adequacy of this type of expectancy-value theory was useful in accounting for performance variation in achievement situations. The Porter-Lawler approach was only one way in which the expectancy x value framework was applied to the study of achievement-oriented behavior. McClelland (1955) contributed another theoretical basis by arguing that achievement motivation develops in some people more than in others because for some people achievement outcomes have positive effect, that is, these outcomes are only of moderate discrepancy from what has been previously experienced. He outlined his basic rationale as follows: 1. Individuals differ in the degree to which they find achievement a satisfying experience. 2. Individuals with a high need for achievement tend to prefer the following situations and will work harder in them than individuals of low achievement: a. Situations of moderate risk - the rationale for this is that feelings of achievement will probably not occur in cases of great risk. b. Situations in which knowledge of results is provided - the rationale for this is that a person with a high degree of achievement motivation will want to know whether he has achieved or not. c. Situations in which the individual responsibility is provided - the rationale here is that a person oriented toward achievement will want to make sure that he, and not somebody else, gets the credit for it. 3. Since the business entrepreneurial role has the characteristics outlined in 2a, b, and c, the individuals of high need for achievement will be attracted to the entrepreneurial role as a lifetime occupation (p. 193). According to McClelland's original frame-work, achievement should not have the parameters of moderate risk-taking, quick feedback, and individual responsibility. Yet such relationships do occur (Cummings, 1967). This suggests that what is actually being measured is a general performance capability in real-life situations and not performance variation as a function of different kinds of task and risk situations. Support for the moderate risk-taking notion, a key aspect of the theory, was highly controversial (Kogan and Wallach, 1967). The reason for this was that in experimental studies in which this aspect had been supported, the level of difficulty was defined by the experimenter, the one who has decided what should be labeled a hard, moderate, or easy task (Atkinson and Litwin, 1960). In the area of achievement motivation itself as a specific content question, it was proposed that several kinds of cognitive activities can take place as a result of a behavior that has led to achievement (Weiner et al., 1972). These cognitive activities and their hypothesized outcomes were described as follows: Expectancy Stimulus >>> Cognitive Achievement >>> >>> Behavior Affect Weiner's (1972) argument that high and low need achievement individuals differed significantly. The high achievement person was more likely to attribute success to his own efforts. There was some evidence that different motivational processes may be involved in achieving as an individual and achieving within a group. A strong ego was viewed to be of considerable value for achievement as an individual (Korman, 1971b; McClelland, 1961). On the other hand, it was detrimental when trying to achieve within a group where sublimination of the self may be necessary (Collins and Guetzkow, 1962). Future research question regarding achievement motivation that need to be asked are the two sets of findings reconcilable and under what conditions?