29.3 Achievement Motivation

29-4 What is achievement motivation?

achievement motivation a desire for significant accomplishment; for mastery of skills or ideas; for control; and for attaining a high standard.

Some motives seem to have little obvious survival value. Billionaires may be motivated to make ever more money, reality TV stars to attract ever more social media followers, politicians to achieve ever more power, daredevils to seek ever greater thrills. Such motives seem not to diminish when they are fed. The more we achieve, the more we may need to achieve. Psychologist Henry Murray (1938) defined achievement motivation as a desire for significant accomplishment, for mastering skills or ideas, for control, and for attaining a high standard.

image
Calum’s road: What grit can accomplish Having spent his life on the Scottish island of Raasay, farming a small patch of land, tending its lighthouse, and fishing, Malcolm (“Calum”) MacLeod (1911-1988) felt anguished. His local government repeatedly refused to build a road that would enable vehicles to reach his north end of the island. With the once-flourishing population there having dwindled to two—MacLeod and his wife—he responded with heroic determination. One spring morning in 1964, MacLeod, then in his fifties, gathered an ax, a chopper, a shovel, and a wheelbarrow. By hand, he began to transform the existing footpath into a 1.75-mile road (Miers, 2009).
“With a road,” a former neighbor explained, “he hoped new generations of people would return to the north end of Raasay,” restoring its culture (Hutchinson, 2006). Day after day he worked through rough hillsides, along hazardous cliff faces, and over peat bogs. Finally, 10 years later, he completed his supreme achievement. The road, which the government has since surfaced, remains a visible example of what vision plus determined grit can accomplish. It bids us each to ponder: What “roads”—what achievements—might we, with sustained effort, build in the years before us?
From Calum’s Road by Roger Hutchinson, reproduced courtesy of Birlinn Ltd.

Thanks to their persistence and eagerness for challenge, people with high achievement motivation do achieve more. One study followed the lives of 1528 California children whose intelligence test scores were in the top 1 percent. Forty years later, when researchers compared those who were most and least successful professionally, they found a motivational difference. Those most successful were more ambitious, energetic, and persistent. As children, they had more active hobbies. As adults, they participated in more groups and sports (Goleman, 1980). Gifted children are able learners. Accomplished adults are tenacious doers. Most of us are energetic doers when starting and when finishing a project. It’s easiest—have you noticed?—to get stuck in the middle. That’s when high achievers keep going (Bonezzi et al., 2011).

“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931)

In other studies of both secondary school and university students, self-discipline has surpassed intelligence test scores to better predict school performance, attendance, and graduation honors. When combined with positive enthusiasm, sustained effort predicts success for teachers, too—with their students making good academic progress (Duckworth et al., 2009). For school performance, “discipline outdoes talent,” concluded researchers Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman (2005, 2006).

376

Discipline also refines talent. By their early twenties, top violinists have accumulated thousands of lifetime practice hours—in fact, double the practice time of other violin students aiming to be teachers (Ericsson 2001, 2006, 2007). A study of outstanding scholars, athletes, and artists found that all were highly motivated and self-disciplined, willing to dedicate hours every day to the pursuit of their goals (Bloom, 1985). As child prodigies illustrate (think young Mozart composing at age 8), native talent matters, too (Hambrick & Meinz, 2011; Ruthsatz & Urbach, 2012). In sports, music, and chess, for example, people’s practice-time differences, while significant, account for a third or less of their performance differences (Hambrick et al., 2014a, b; Macnamara et al., 2014). Superstar achievers are, it seems, distinguished both by their extraordinary daily discipline and by their extraordinary natural talent.

grit in psychology, passion and perseverance in the pursuit of long-term goals.

Duckworth and Seligman have a name for this passionate dedication to an ambitious, long-term goal: grit. When combined with self-control (regulating one’s attention and actions in the face of temptation), gritty goal-striving can produce great achievements. “If you want to look good in front of thousands,” the saying goes, “you have to outwork thousands in front of nobody.”

Although intelligence is distributed like a bell curve, achievements are not. That tells us that achievement involves much more than raw ability. That is why organizational psychologists seek ways to engage and motivate ordinary people doing ordinary jobs (see Appendix B: Psychology at Work). And that is why training students in hardiness—resilience under stress—leads to better grades (Maddi et al., 2009).

RETRIEVE IT

Question

GPd9AHlISL6wD34B0jhAZqtvE5o1jX6plrjlUyrrIZfEfpdCCvYFUB+xs24Z131oEjdeBPVr0ceaij88/5oXvIsHCDotljzAAqF2TBUEWEWvE9vdwyXbSBNcpWi/FlToecLFS6PG/v/uLpag4CkXST9HisY=
ANSWER: self-discipline (grit)