Need for affiliation
Also known as: nAff
A drive to form and maintain warm, friendly relationships and to feel accepted by others.
What it means
Need for affiliation is a dispositional motive to establish, maintain, and restore positive relationships and to be liked and accepted. People high in the motive seek the company of others, work to avoid conflict and rejection, and derive satisfaction from belonging and harmony. McClelland and others contrasted it with a related but distinct intimacy motive, which emphasizes the quality and depth of close bonds over the quantity of contact, and noted that high affiliation can have a defensive, anxious-about-rejection flavor. The nuance is that strong affiliation motivation can impair performance in roles requiring tough, unpopular decisions, since the discomfort of disapproval looms large. It matters as the third of McClelland's core social motives and helps explain conformity, team cohesion, and sensitivity to social exclusion.
Examples
An employee high in affiliation motivation thrives on collaborative projects but struggles to deliver critical feedback that might cost a friendship.
A student chooses the module with the group project over the one with the solo dissertation, valuing the company of the seminar as much as the subject itself.
A landlord high in affiliation motivation lets the rent slide for months rather than have one uncomfortable conversation with a tenant she has come to like.
First described in Henry Murray (1938); developed by McClelland & Atkinson (mid-20th century).