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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Boyatzis, R.E. (2020). McClelland, David C.. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_2230
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