A Study Of Manager's Achievement Motivation: Structure, Assessment And Mechanism

The research of achievement motivation is a key field of managerial psychology. The present study was based on the comprehensive review of literature with the methods of typical case study, questionnaire survey, and situational simulations with factor analysis and structural equation modeling. Chinese manager's achievement orientation, the structure of achievement motivation, their relationship with performance, situational assessment of achievement motivation, functioning mechanism of achievement motivation and task decision were studied. The study is divided into five parts. One thousand seven hundreds and sixty seven managers were surveyed in this study.The first part of the study was done in a famous successful Chinese company. The achievement motivation of managers across-different levels was studied by structured interview and critical incidents analysis. A two-dimensional model of motivation was established: self-social orientation and process-result orientation. We found four critical elements: hard working behavior, exceeding of goals, attribution to group benefits and self-interests. The close relationship between organizational culture and achievement motivation was revealed.The second part of the study was an attempt to confirm the conclusions from the first part. We proposed a model of manager's achievement motivation based on study one. Eight experts were invited to revise the model. Questionnaire survey was adopted to verify the structure of achievement motivation and the relationship among personal characteristics and organizational culture. The main conclusions were the following: the two-dimensional model was confirmed and common; the achievement motivation of managers was affected by organizational culture and personal characteristics such as age, management level and tenure.In the third part of the study, we developed a critical behavior inventory to assess achievement motivation. Based on four orientations: hard work behavior, exceeding of goals, attribution to group benefits and self-interests, we developed managers' achievement orientation inventory. We confirmed the model by structural equation modeling. We found that Chinese managers had self achievement motivation and social achievement motivation. Generally speaking, self achievement motivation was stronger than social achievement motivation, and showed closer relation to performance. With the career development, the structure and level of achievement motivation were also changed.A tool for evaluating managerial motivation with achievement motivation as the core was developed in the forth parts. We took an alternative approach based on situational judgment and task choice as a new way to measure work motivation. We first collected a number of managerial decision situations closely related to work motivation by interviewing the managers. Second, we asked managers to provide various typical solutions (behavioral response) to those situations, which varied in effectiveness to solve the problem in a situation. Six hundreds and seventy five managers from ten representative cities across the nation participated in the survey. The results showed that the situational judgment test had a good psychometric parameters with moderate reliability, validity, and discriminant power. We then established reference standards of achievement motivation across management levels with a detailed user manual.Part five focused on an situational simulation experiment on achievement motivation and task decision under uncertainty. A new approach was adopted to systematically analyze manager's achievement motivation. Based on conceptual model of achievement motivation developed in study three, we controlled achievement goal orientation in the experiment. By analyzing how various achievement goals influenced goal commitment, success expectation, and achievement value on task decision, and developing an integrated model of achievement motivation and task decision with structural equation modeling, we found that task decision was influenced by achievement motivation, success expectation, and achievement value which was the most important, while manager's judgment of achievement value was affected by achievement goal and success expectation. The result also showed that achievement had an effect on success expectation. Achievement motivation was affected by task decision.As a conclusion, based on these studies above, an integrated model of functioning mechanism for achievement motivation was proposed. Theoretical and practical implications, and directions for future research were discussed.