                          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?
