Introduction
David C. McClelland was a senior faculty member at Harvard University’s Department of Social Relations for most of his career. He is widely known as a motivational psychologist who established social motives of Needs for Achievement, Affiliation, and Power from predictors of individual behavior such as entrepreneurship, alcohol abuse, health, and immune functioning all the way to predicting national trends in economic development, wars, social movements and health metrics.
Overview of His Life
He was born on May 20, 1917, in Mt. Vernon, NY, and died on March 27, 1998, in Lexington, MA. He graduated from Yale with his PhD in 1941. He was a professor at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, 1942–1956; program director, the Ford Foundation, 1952–1953; professor at Harvard University, 1949–1950, 1956–1987; professor and chairman at Department of Social Relations from 1962 to 1967; professor emeritus, 1987–1998; and professor at Boston University, 1987–1998. He founded McBer and...
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Selected Bibliography
Boyatzis, R. E. (1982). The competent manager: A model for effective performance. New York: Wiley.
Boyatzis, R. E. (1998). Transforming qualitative information: Thematic analysis and code development. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Goleman, D. (1998). Working with emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam.
McClelland, D. C. (1951). Personality. New York: William Sloane Associates.
McClelland, D. C. (1961). The achieving society. New York: Van Nostrand.
McClelland, D. C. (1964). The roots of consciousness. New York: Van Nostrand.
McClelland, D. C. (1965). Toward a theory of motive acquisition. American Psychologist, 20, 321–333.
McClelland, D. C. (1973). Testing for competence rather than intelligence. American Psychologist, 28, 1–14.
McClelland, D. C. (1975). Power: The inner experience. New York: Irvington.
McClelland, D. C. (1979). Inhibited power motivation and high blood pressure in men. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 88, 182–190.
McClelland, D. C. (1984). Motives, personality, and society: Selected papers. New York: Praeger.
McClelland, D. C. (1985). Human motivation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
McClelland, D. C. (1998). Identifying competencies with behavioral event interviews. Psychological Science, 9(5), 331–339.
McClelland, D. C., & Boyatzis, R. E. (1982). The leadership motive pattern and long-term success in management. Journal of Applied Psychology, 67(6), 737–743.
McClelland, D. C., & Burnham, D. H. (1976). Power is the great motivator. Harvard Business Review, 54, 100–111.
McClelland, D. C., & Winter, D. G. (1969). Motivating economic achievement. New York: Free Press.
McClelland, D. C., Atkinson, J. W., Clark, R. A., & Lowell, E. L. (1953). The achievement motive. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
McClelland, D. C., Baldwin, A. L., Bronfenbrenner, U., & Strodbeck, F. L. (1958). Talent and society. New York: Van Nostrand.
McClelland, D. C., Davis, W. N., Kalin, R., & Wanner, E. (1972). The drinking man: Alcohol and human motivation. New York: Free Press.
McClelland, D. C., Rhinesmith, S., & Kristensen, R. (1975). The effects of power training on community action agencies. Journal of Applied Behavior Sciences, 11, 92–115.
Miller, W. B. (1981). Motivation techniques: Does one work best? Management Review, February: 47–52.
Miron, D., & McClelland, D. C. (1979). The impact of achievement motivation training on small business. California Management Review, 21(4), 13–28.
Smith, C.P., with Atkinson, J.W., McClelland, D.C., and Veroff, J. (eds.) (1992). Motivation and personality: Handbook of thematic content analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Spencer Jr., L. M., & Spencer, S. (1993). Competence at work: Models for superior performance. New York: Wiley.
Winter, D. G., & McClelland, D. C. (1978). Thematic analysis: An empirically derived measure of the effects of liberal arts education. Journal of Educational Psychology, 70, 8–16.
Winter, D. G., McClelland, D. G., & Stewart, A. J. (1981). A new case for the liberal arts: Assessing institutional goals and student development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
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Boyatzis, R.E. (2017). McClelland, David C.. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_2230-1
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