Question

Describe the achievement motive and discuss how individual differences in the need for achievement influence behaviour. Briefly explain how situational factors influence achievement strivings.

Answer 1

The term achievement motive refers to the wishes or desires of a man who has the wish of high standards or desire to become a famous personality or a rich man, etc through any internal sources or external sources which he come across in his everyday life. This absolutely varies from one individual to the other through the situational influences.

For example, when we are at the childhood stages and through the influence of cartoon movie and other movies we wanted to become so and so of supernatural characters. When the parents started to encourage ourselves during our childhood years to become a sportsman, physician, scientist or a reporter as per their desires, without knowing the meaning of each personality we would have said 'yes' to their wishes and started telling that as our motive in our life.

As we grow up in school and college, with the gained knowledge we started experimenting ourselves in new life situations and making our own desire and telling others as our motive of life (which we try to achieve as early as possible).

We can classify some of the situational factors that influence the actual achievement strivings are:

The structure of our school and college curriculum, behavior and personality of the teacher we met in our life, the methodology of teaching, family issues and instability with family members, cooperation of the parents, our learning environment, and the financial stability of the family of the individual.

It has to be noted that when a person does not achieve proper basic needs, he will not think about the high achievement, rather if he is satisfied with the basic need, then he can aim for safety, then only he can go further in life and started thinking about achieving high in his life as motive. So, the external situations play a major role in anyone's achievement of his longtime motive of his life.