Need for Achievement

Need for achievement, often abbreviated n-Ach, is a person's enduring desire to accomplish difficult tasks, meet or exceed a standard of excellence, and master challenging skills, a concept most closely associated with the psychologist David McClelland, who built on Henry Murray's earlier classification of need for achievement as one of several secondary or psychogenic human needs. McClelland and his collaborators measured need for achievement using projective techniques such as the Thematic Apperception Test, in which a person's achievement-related themes in stories told about ambiguous pictures were scored to estimate the strength of their underlying motive, an approach central to McClelland's widely cited research on achievement motivation. People high in need for achievement are described in this research tradition as preferring moderately difficult tasks that offer a realistic chance of success along with a genuine sense of accomplishment, seeking concrete feedback on their performance, and taking personal responsibility for outcomes, in contrast to a preference either for very easy tasks that guarantee success or very difficult tasks where failure carries little blame. In education, need for achievement has been used to help explain why students differ in the goals they set for themselves, the difficulty of tasks they choose to attempt, and their persistence when a task proves challenging, making it an early precursor to later motivation research on achievement goals and self-efficacy in academic settings.