Need for achievement
Also known as: nAch, Achievement motivation
A stable drive to meet high standards, master challenges, and accomplish difficult things for the satisfaction of doing so.
What it means
Need for achievement is a dispositional motive to accomplish challenging tasks, attain excellence against a standard, and experience the satisfaction of competence. People high in the motive prefer moderately difficult goals — hard enough to be meaningful, easy enough that success reflects skill rather than luck — and they respond strongly to feedback and personal responsibility for outcomes. Often measured implicitly through stories told about ambiguous pictures (the Thematic Apperception Test), it has been tied to entrepreneurial behavior and even, controversially, to rates of economic growth. The nuance is that implicit and self-reported achievement motives diverge and predict different behaviors, and the motive interacts with fear of failure to determine risk preferences. It matters as one of the oldest and most studied engines of sustained, self-set striving.
Examples
Given a ring-toss game, a high-achievement person stands at a challenging but realistic distance, not so close that success is trivial nor so far that it's luck.
A founder deliberately picks a market where winning depends on execution rather than on a lucky regulatory ruling, because succeeding by chance would not feel like succeeding.
A runner sets a target a few minutes off her personal best, not an easy finish or a national record, and checks her split times at every kilometre.
First described in Henry Murray (1938); developed by David McClelland & John Atkinson (1950s).