David McClelland

McClelland is the empirical support for a claim this site makes structurally elsewhere: that the drive to control others and the capacity to govern yourself are different things, and that the second is what decides what the first becomes.

Wanting power is not one motive. It is two, and what separates them is how much restraint sits on top of the drive.

The two faces

McClelland split the need for power in two.

Personalized power is influence wanted for its own sake and treated as zero-sum, where your gain is someone else's loss. In his research it comes with little inhibition or self-control, is exercised impulsively, and correlates with rudeness, exploitation of subordinates, heavy drinking and decisions that damage the group.

Socialized power is influence wanted in order to accomplish something for a group. It does not involve less drive. It involves the same drive with restraint on it.

The variable that separates them

The distinguishing factor is what he called activity inhibition, a stable disposition to restrain and regulate impulse. High power motive with high inhibition produces power used for collective ends. High power motive with low inhibition produces the destructive version.

This matters for what a young reader should take from this site. It says that the problem is not ambition or the wish to have an effect on the world, both of which are ordinary. The problem is ambition without the self-government to shape it, and self-government is a disposition rather than a fixed trait.

Read alongside

Alfred Adler made the same distinction sixty years earlier in clinical rather than experimental language, separating striving over other people from striving toward a task. Tom Tyler supplies the institutional version: authority that is perceived as procedurally fair produces more compliance than authority that threatens.

Serious objections

• The measurement is contested. Motives were scored from stories people told about pictures, a method with known reliability problems, and results depend heavily on who is scoring.
• Activity inhibition is under-specified. McClelland never developed it at length, it was operationalized partly by counting negations in written responses, and researchers disagree on whether to include it in the leader motive profile at all.
• Much of the evidence is correlational and drawn from American managers, which limits what can be concluded about causation or about anywhere else.
• The framework was developed for and funded by organizations wanting better managers, which is worth putting the four questions to.