Let's talk about process theories. Process theories don't try to explain what motivates people They try to explain how motivation works fundamentally. They propose explanations of how individuals form particular priorities of needs or values that underly their motivation. And they explain how we make choices of how much effort to exert for any given task or activity. And because they are agnostic about the content, rather values or the needs that drive people, they are very applicable to multiple cultural contexts. And that makes them very interesting for international leaders. I want to focus on two theories that I find particularly valuable and practical. For leaders and those are the Learned Needs Theory and the Expectancy Theory. And those really can help leaders to understand and in a very practical way influence motivation of individuals. And from those two theories we'll branch out at the end a little bit to talk about different cultural standards for equity and fairness. All right, let's talk about the Learned Needs Theory. This was developed by David McClelland in the 1960s. And his big innovation, his big contribution, was to say that, needs that people have, and the ordering of those needs, are not given at birth. They're not intrinsic. They are learned. And the way that this works is that you make the associations with particular experiences that you have yourself or that you see others having with positive or negative emotions and that determines your ordering of needs. So for example, you might as a child repeatedly achieve a difficult task and get the recognition and the feedback for having mastered those challenges and that becomes your source of joy and happiness and satisfaction. And that can then foster an achievement motive in McClelland's terms throughout life and that would mean that achievement for you becomes the top of your personal hierarchy of needs. This is a trait that we find very often with entrepreneurs that have a very strong achievement motive. They are motivated by setting themselves, tougher and tougher challenges, and achieving those challenges is what really drives them. Not necessarily the profits, only that they made from their entrepreneurial adventures, the profit becomes the feedback mechanism that shows them that they really have achieved what they set out to do. People also form needs based on negative experiences. So someone might have negative experiences from being excluded from being ignored being ostracized from a group that they feel kind of left alone. They feel like an outsider. That might foster a need for affiliation later So that you avoid those negative feelings of being the outsider. You're seeking the approval of groups later on in life. And we would expect that to be a particularly strong of collective societies where belonging to a group is particularly important. Now, having an affiliation motive doesn't mean that you're not trying hard to to accomplish things. But it means that it's not the end goal Though your achievements, your efforts are directed towards, either gaining more approval from the group that you belong to or supporting through your own efforts the goals that are set by the group. Some people might have had the experience of being powerless, of feeling helpless, that they don't have the feeling that they have a lot of impact on others, or that they are in control of their own lives. That can foster a power motivation, the desire to have more influence. More control over others. To have more impact, more responsibility later in life. My own father had that experience in the 1960s in East Germany. He wanted to study architecture and this was a field that for political reasons he was not allowed to enter. The powers that be restricted access for him. And that fostered in him a strong kind of power orientation for his career and his interpretation of power was he wanted to be independent. He never again wanted to feel like somebody else is controlling his career and his future so he became a self employed photographer. And throughout his career he fiercely defended that independence. He never wanted to be under anyone's thumb, he wanted to be his own man so to speak. So those three the affiliation motive, the power motive and the achievement motive. Those are the three kinds of needs that McClelland was focusing on. And that's interest in those three categories what I'm interested in is this process by which we learn these motives. These needs. And this is not just about childhood trauma or something that you have to work through with you shrink at some stage. It really is about the constant cultural and social influence that each one of us is subjected to basically everyday. Just about 60 years before McClelland formulated his theories, the German sociologist Max Weber had some similar ideas. He was suggesting that the Protestant reformation in Europe provided a system of values and a mindset to people that was very much centered around the notion of self-reliance and working hard, and self-improvement. And that is system of values and this mindset really provided the foundation for modern capitalism. That people develop particular motives for their behavior, they develop particular motivations that allowed capitalism to flourish. Now McClelland built on those ideas and he was suggesting that what, what might have happened is that the value system provided by the Protestant ethic as, as Weber called it influenced people to pursue particular kinds of careers. That was the starting point, the motivations that they developed to pursue particular careers. And children would then see in the experience that their parents had with pursuing a particular career path and the outcomes that they had from that that would influence the children, in turn, to develop particular needs, or prioritize particular needs. So it's through this local environment essentially, that the needs orientation can be passed on from generation to generation. And that similar motivations and motivational orderings emerge. Now some people have argued that we can see in current and former communist countries that achievement motivation was culturally not very accepted. In fact it was looked upon quite critically. That if you were trying to arise above others and be better than others, that you could be construed as an enemy of the people. That positive feedback for that kind of striving was very rare. That punishment could even be possible. For trying to rise above the ranks. So if you have such a culture environment, you can imagine that, the motive of achievement is something that really gets pushed down upon; in part out of concern that people have for this collective scorn of others. And part because they might even feel guilty, they have internalized the cultural values so much that they feel if they're trying to achieve more than others they feel guilty for being in non-compliance with the cultural values. Now, it's very interesting to observe nowadays is that in Russia and in China, after the economic liberalization we actually see a lot of this bottled up achievement motivation to erupt quite explosively at least for some. So what this general idea brings us back to is this notion that culture does not influence our behavior. Or our values, our needs by providing this abstract large out there influence. But it's through the local communities that we're embedded in. That this influence is actually exerted, and we can extend this idea to the professional communities. You observe others in your work environment and see their experiences, their success or failure and you associate positive or negative emotions with that particularly if those others are part of a referent group. So if they belong to a group that you perceive as being high in status. And to be a desirable member of that group. So if you see those behaviors chances are you might actually take some of those motives to be your own. That's certainly what happened to me so I always regarded professors and teachers as being high in status and I perceived them to be well-recognized and appreciated by society so intellectual achievement became one of my driving motives in life as well. So, because of that local influence, if you will of the community that I was embedded in. So if needs are learned, and the influence over the ordering of those needs actually is exerted by the local environment, there is an important implication for leaders. And that is that they can actively influence the learned needs of their followers. And they can do so through training programs and through educational efforts. And this is something that McClelland devoted quite a lot of energy to. He developed training programs that helped augment, for example, the achievement motive, which he felt was really critical for managerial and entrepreneurial success. And he did that across multiple cultures. He deployed these trainings in the US, in Mexico, and in India. And the findings from these experiments are quite fascinating. What he was able to show is that he can boost achievement motivation in the short-term and that actually led to the higher attainment of personal success for those participants. But, in order to sustain those gains participants had to actually be embedded in a supportive environment both professionally and culturally at large and the Indian and the Mexican participants really struggled to sustain their gains. They actually fell to the original levels again because their cultures were more group-oriented. So what we can take away from that is that cultural priorities with regards to motives actually trumped the individual needs priorities that were induced by this intervention.
