David McClelland

David Clarence McClelland (1917 to 1998) was an American psychologist best known for his work on human motivation and for developing achievement motivation theory, often called the need for achievement or n-achievement theory. Born in Mount Vernon, New York, he earned his bachelor's degree at Wesleyan University, a master's degree at the University of Missouri and a doctorate in experimental psychology at Yale, then taught at Connecticut College and Wesleyan before spending thirty years at Harvard, where he chaired the Department of Psychology and Social Relations, and later moved to Boston University. He focused on three motives, achievement, affiliation and power, created scoring systems for the Thematic Apperception Test, and promoted the study of competencies, including their importance for the outcomes of higher education. A 2002 survey ranked him the fifteenth most cited psychologist of the twentieth century.