Achievement, Power, and Affliliation

Post Written By: Crystal Kubeczka

There are multiple ways of fulfilling needs through motivation, but today I am going to talk about fulfilling needs throughout achievement, affliliation, and power. Characteristics of achievement throughout motivation in someone would include having a strong need to set and accomplish goals, likes to take risks to accomplish these goals, wants to recieve regular feedback on their progress throughout these achievements and often likes to work alone. Whereas someone with the characteristics of affiliation is oposite, they like to work and belong to  a certain group. People with affiliation want to be liked by others and will often go along with the other peoples ideas just to feel belonged. They do not like dealing with high risks or uncertainty, and they favor collaboration over competition. Affiliation characteristics are quite opposite of achievement characteristics. The third type of characteristic is power and they are the more dominant ones. They want to control and influence others, they enjoy competition and winning, and enjoy being recognized. They often tend to fight to win all arguements and like to be praised for their work.

Some examples of how to motivate employees with a high need of achieve include: (1) give them non-routine tasks (2) give them fast feedback on their performance because people with achievement characteristics like lots of praise about their job and (3) continually increase their responisibility.

Some examples of how to motivate employees with a high need of affiliation include: (1) they think about friends and relationships often (2) like to develop and help others (3) have a low need for power and (4) tend to avoid important roles because they rather be part of the group rather than the leader.

Some examples of how to moitivate employees with a high need for power include: (1) let them plan their jobs (2) include them on decision making (3) they like to work alone and (4) assign them whole tasks instead of parts.