Testing the convergent and discriminant validity of three implicit motive measures: PSE, OMT, and MMG

Stuck in short-term, daily operations, or not?: Unraveling SME's long-term orientation

Long-term orientation (LTO) is an essential strategic option for firms to shape their future success, in particular for SMEs which are often submerged by daily operations. Surprisingly, little is known about the underlying personal and contextual drivers of LTO in an SME context. To unravel why some SME entrepreneurs adopt an LTO, while others seem to be stuck in short term and daily operations, we consider the (interacting) impact of both personal and contextual drivers. We carefully select well known drivers for their impact on various other aspects of SME's LTO: Need for achievement, as a personal driver, and the entrepreneur's perception of the institutional entrepreneurial support (PIES), as a contextual driver. The latter consists of a regulative, normative and cognitive institutional dimension. Based on a study on 176 SMEs in an emerging country, Indonesia, we confirm that both personal as well as contextual drivers individually and interactively impact an SME's LTO. Specifically, when highly achievement motivated entrepreneurs perceive that institutional regulations support entrepreneurial activities, they tend to adopt a higher level of LTO. We discuss implications for SMEs and policy makers, and provide suggestions for future research.

Motive-Specific Affective Contingencies and Their Relevance for Personality and Motivated Behavior

Individuals differ in the tendency to derive pleasure out of motive-specific incentives, such as being socially included or attaining power. Multiple theoretical approaches have proposed that such motive-specific positive affective contingencies (PACs) are central building blocks of motive dispositions and personality more broadly. In the current research, we put this claim to test and investigated individual differences with regard to motive-specific PACs in the affiliation and power domains. We measured PACs via spontaneous emotional reactions to motive-specific cues, as assessed by affect ratings and electromyographic (EMG) recordings of smile responses. Both of these PAC operationalizations were highly internally consistent and moderately to highly stable across time. Furthermore, motive-specific PACs were linked in a manner consistent with theory to measures of motive dispositions and to personality traits with motivational underpinnings (i.e., extraversion, agreeableness, and narcissism). Finally, in the affiliation domain, motive-specific PACs were linked to objectively assessed, key motivational outcomes (i.e., attentional orientation, behavior in daily life, and in the laboratory). Taken together, the findings underscore the relevance of affective contingencies for the understanding of personality and motivated behavior.

The Implicit Achievement Motive in the Writing Style

Linguistic theories and research indicate that unconscious processes should influence the content, but moreover also the way how things are expressed. As the first is well researched and the second is almost neglected, I want to assess how the writing style of a person is related to the implicit achievement motive and its two components hope of success (HS) and fear of failure (FF). Therefore, thematic apperception test/picture story exercise responses of 2942 persons were analyzed regarding the three writing style features (1) syntax, (2) nominal/verbal writing, and (3) function words. According to the assumptions, the results of two independent measures (Stanford Parser and LIWC) show that a verbal fluent writing style with simple syntax is associated with HS, whereby FF-motivated people show nominal writing with interjections, conjunctions, and complex punctuations.

Social Support as a Stress Buffer or Stress Amplifier and the Moderating Role of Implicit Motives: Protocol for a Randomized Study

BACKGROUND

Previous research shows that providing social support in socioevaluative stress situations reduces participants' stress responses. This stress-buffer effect, however, does not hold for everybody, and some studies even found a stress-amplifying effect of social support. Motive disposition research suggests that social motives (affiliation and power) lead to differential and sometimes even opposing affective and physiological responses to interpersonal interaction processes. We here integrate both lines of research and hypothesize that participants with strong affiliation motives benefit, while participants with strong power motives do not benefit from social support in terms of psychobiological responses to a given stressor. Further, participants with strong affiliation and power motives are expected to respond to social support with the arousal of motive-specific affects and reproductive hormone responses (affiliation: progesterone; power: estradiol and testosterone). In addition, we test sex differences in the response to social support and in the strengths of social motives.

OBJECTIVE

The main objective of this study is to test whether social motives and participants' sex moderate the effects of social support in stressful situations.

METHODS

We aim to collect data from 308 participants recruited at our local university. Participants' social motives are assessed using a standardized measure in motive research (Picture Story Exercise). Then, the Trier Social Stress Test for Groups (TSST-G) is used to experimentally induce psychosocial stress. One group of participants receives social support from an associate of the experimenter, while the control group does not receive social support. Stress responses will be assessed by a modified version of the state anxiety scale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and by physiological indicators of stress (cortisol and α-amylase from saliva samples) at 7 measurement points. Reproductive hormones will be analyzed in 4 of these 7 saliva samples. Heart rate and heart rate variability will be assessed continuously. We will additionally measure participants' performance in an interview (part of the TSST-G) using a self-developed categorization system.

RESULTS

The Ethics Committee of the University of Constance approved the application to conduct the study on December 18, 2018. Furthermore, the study was retrospectively registered in the German Clinical Trials Register (DKRS; ID: DRKS00028503) on March 09, 2022. The start of the experiment was planned for the beginning of 2019, but was postponed to June 2021 due to COVID-19. Publication of the first results is planned for spring 2023.

CONCLUSIONS

Our theory-driven integration of social motives in social support research and the precise analysis of sex differences might disentangle inconsistent findings in TSST research. The more faceted view on individual differences has direct implications for applied contexts as it provides a framework for tailored conceptualizations of social support programs.

TRIAL REGISTRATION

German Clinical Trials Register DRKS00028503; https://tinyurl.com/5a87x4da.

INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID)

PRR1-10.2196/39509.

The effect of motive-goal congruence on adolescents’ academic goal engagement and disengagement

Academic achievement is an important developmental goal during adolescence. Two independent factors involved in academic motivation are implicit motives and explicit goals. In this study, we examined whether high school students’ (N = 213) implicit achievement motive, explicit achievement goals, and their interactions were associated with academic goal engagement and disengagement. Our findings showed that academic goal engagement and disengagement were associated with explicit achievement goals only, and not with the implicit achievement motive. However, interactions between the implicit achievement motive and grade aspiration (i.e., a specific explicit achievement goal) revealed that individuals with a low implicit achievement motive can still attain high goal engagement if they have a high grade aspiration. We also found that motive-goal congruence was associated with lower goal disengagement. Overall, these findings suggest that explicit achievement goals and specific academic goals play a dominant role in goal engagement behavior in the structured setting of high schools, and may allow youth to overcome the constraints of having a low implicit achievement motive.

Not self-aware? Psychological antecedents and consequences of alienating from one’s actual motives, emotions, and goals

Philosophers and scientists have been puzzling over the potential antecedents and consequences of self-awareness or its relative absence since time immemorial. One major reason is the difficulty of identifying individuals’ actual needs, emotions, or goals and thus making statements about their level of self-awareness. Drawing on a “duality of mind” approach, we review our research that quantified discrepancies between first-person perspective and third-person perspective assessments of motives (“needs”), emotions, and goals as indicators of relative self-awareness. Also, we expand on their proximal causes related to personality–situation interactions and their emotional and motivational consequences. We discuss similarities among the three branches of research on motives, emotions, and goals and, lastly, provide an outlook for future research.

On the nature of implicit motives

David McClelland’s research on the different kinds of (implicit) motives and how to measure them has had a substantial influence on contemporary psychology of motivation. He did not, however, reflect on the nature of implicit motives in much detail. In this article, I fill this gap. I argue that implicit motives should not be understood as mental states the agent has no introspective access to. Instead, I propose that the implicit motives that McClelland and others in the field distinguish—the power, achievement, and affiliation motive—are generic descriptions of specific ends an agent may act for. These motives are implicit, because they are not explicitly expressed but merely implied in what the agent does, thinks, and feels. Establishing whether an agent acts for or has a certain implicit motive, then, is a matter of interpreting the agent’s expressions. This proposal is in line with and explains the empirical findings.

Measuring Achievement, Affiliation, and Power Motives in Mobility Situations: Development of the Multi-Motive Grid Mobility

The current study introduces the Multi-Motive Grid Mobility (MMG-M) in an age-stratified sample (N = 206) that aims to disentangle six motive components - hope of success, hope of affiliation, hope of power, fear of failure, fear of rejection, and fear of power - in mobility-related and mobility-unrelated scenarios. Similar to the classical Multi-Motive Grid (MMG), we selected 14 picture scenarios representing seven mobility and seven non-mobility situations. The scenarios were combined with 12 statements from the MMG. Both the MMG-M and MMG were assessed to allow comparability between psychometric criteria. The results of confirmatory factor analyses yielded a good model fit for a six-factor solution with an additional mobility factor for the MMG-M. Internal consistency of the items was similar to the MMG. Lastly, we investigated associations between the motive components and mobility-related variables. We found that risk awareness was positively related to all fear components in both mobility and non-mobility scenarios. Most importantly, physical constraint was positively associated with fear of rejection and fear of power in mobility situations underlining the importance to create support systems to reduce these concerns in people's everyday lives.

Are GRU Cells More Specific and LSTM Cells More Sensitive in Motive Classification of Text?

In the Thematic Apperception Test, a picture story exercise (TAT/PSE; Heckhausen, 1963), it is assumed that unconscious motives can be detected in the text someone is telling about pictures shown in the test. Therefore, this text is classified by trained experts regarding evaluation rules. We tried to automate this coding and used a recurrent neuronal network (RNN) because of the sequential input data. There are two different cell types to improve recurrent neural networks regarding long-term dependencies in sequential input data: long-short-term-memory cells (LSTMs) and gated-recurrent units (GRUs). Some results indicate that GRUs can outperform LSTMs; others show the opposite. So the question remains when to use GRU or LSTM cells. The results show (N = 18000 data, 10-fold cross-validated) that the GRUs outperform LSTMs (accuracy = .85 vs. .82) for overall motive coding. Further analysis showed that GRUs have higher specificity (true negative rate) and learn better less prevalent content. LSTMs have higher sensitivity (true positive rate) and learn better high prevalent content. A closer look at a picture x category matrix reveals that LSTMs outperform GRUs only where deep context understanding is important. As these both techniques do not clearly present a major advantage over one another in the domain investigated here, an interesting topic for future work is to develop a method that combines their strengths.

Distal and proximal motivational processes related to flow experience: Investigating the role of implicit motives, affective and cognitive preferences, and perceived abilities

One of the prominent questions in flow research is the investigation of conditions that need to be met so that people will get involved in an activity for the sheer sake of doing it. The present study examined the relationship between distal (i.e., implicit motives) and proximal (i.e., affective preferences, cognitive preferences, perceived abilities) motivational processes and flow experience based on assumptions of the compensatory model of motivation and volition. In order to arouse the implicit agentic motive, 63 participants worked on an online platform in an open innovation environment. Results showed that affective preferences mediated the effect of the implicit agentic motive on flow experience. Moreover, a hierarchical regression analysis with simple slope tests yielded that, at the proximal level, the congruence of affective preferences, cognitive preferences, and perceived abilities was associated with flow experience. The present research adds some new and essential ingredients to Csikszentmihalyis’ traditional conception of flow.

The Interplay of Achievement Motive-Goal Incongruence and State and Trait Self-Control: A Pilot Study Considering Cortical Correlates of Self-Control

Objective: This study utilized different theoretical perspectives to better understand motor performance. We refered to concepts of achievement motive-goal incongruence and assessed cortical correlates of self-control. We assumed that more self-control is required when people act in conformance with an incongruent goal which, in turn, results in impaired performance. We considered the activation of a brain area associated with self-control (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, dLPFC) as a consequence of motive-goal incongruence. Furthermore, we analyzed whether trait self-control buffers the negative effects of achievement motive-goal incongruence. Method: Twenty-eight participants (17 women, mean age: 24 years), whose implicit achievement motives were assessed at the beginning of the study, performed a handgrip task in an achievement goal condition and in three incongruent conditions, while their dLPFC oxygenation was monitored continuously (using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, fNIRS). Results: None of the two-way interactions (motive × goal condition) reached significance. A significant three-way interaction (motive × trait self-control × goal condition) showed that trait self-control buffered the detrimental effects of incongruence on motor performance. The nature of the three-way interaction predicting dLPFC oxygenation was unexpected. Conclusions: Although our results have to be treated with caution due to a small sample size, we see them as an encouraging starting point for further research on the interplay between motive-goal incongruence and trait and cortical correlates of state self-control that we assume to be important to understand performance in strenuous tasks.

Erfolgssicherheit und -gewissheit (ESG)

Zusammenfassung. Der thematische Apperzeptionstest (TAT; Heckhausen, 1963 ) ist ein bewährtes Verfahren zur Erfassung des impliziten Leistungsmotives. Dabei werden Personen instruiert, zu 6 Bildern Geschichten zu erfinden, welche dann anhand eines spezifischen Kodierschlüssels hinsichtlich der beiden Motivkomponenten Hoffen auf Erfolg und Furcht vor Misserfolg analysiert werden. Die Güte des Verfahrens hängt somit essentiell vom Auswertungskategoriensystem ab. Ziel der vorliegenden Studie ist die Erweiterung des Kodierschlüssels von Heckhausen um die Kategorie Erfolgssicherheit und -gewissheit (ESG) und deren Überprüfung. Die Auswertungsobjektivität, Test-Retest-Reliabilität (Delay: 4 Wochen) und die interne Konsistenz des Verfahrens wurden jeweils mit und ohne Berücksichtigung von ESG erfasst. Diskriminante und konvergente Validität sind durch Übereinstimmung mit konstruktnahen und -fernen Verfahren sowie faktorielle Validität mittels CFA an N = 215 Schülerinnen und Schüler ermittelt worden. Zur Prüfung der experimentellen Validität fand eine gezielte Motivanregung an N = 130 Schülerinnen und Schülern statt. Die Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass durch ESG die Gütekriterien des TAT gesteigert werden können. 

The added value of implicit motives for management research Development and first validation of a Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT) for the measurement of implicit motives

Many Management (sub-)disciplines, from Organizational Behavior and Marketing to Accounting and Strategy, are interested in antecedents and consequences of individual attitudes and traits. A key aspect of personality profiles are explicit and implicit motives. Yet, Management scholars mainly focus on explicit motives, with limited attention to implicit motives. We argue that this state of affairs probably came into being because current Management researchers mainly rely on implicit motive measures that are either difficult to apply or to develop, hampering researchers from applying implicit motive measures. To overcome the downsides of available instruments, we develop a Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT) as an efficient, reliable and valid measure of implicit motives, particularly the needs for achievement, affiliation and power. To explore our BIAT’s predictive validity, we apply this measure to a specific research domain within Management: Entrepreneurship. We examine implicit motives’ association with entrepreneurial self-efficacy, business founding, and financial profitability. Our results show that the introduction of implicit motives can unlock stranded discussions in this research domain. Overall, we argue that implicit motives can help to push the boundaries of the study of deep-level attributes in a wide range of organizational and managerial settings.

Stability of and Changes in Implicit Motives. A Narrative Review of Empirical Studies

Although growing research indicates that certain personality traits change over the lifespan, implicit motives are often deemed to be rather stable personality characteristics. Researchers have been interested in implicit motives for several decades, but our understanding of how these dispositions change still lacks clarity. This article gives an overview and a discussion of the current evidence for the stability of and the changes in implicit motives. After elaborating on the theoretical background of the motive construct and its measurement, we present an overview of studies that have investigated the trainability of implicit motives and their dispositional stability and changes using cross-sectional and longitudinal methods. Although the results are inconclusive concerning the direction of change, the reviewed studies suggest that implicit motives adapt to life circumstances much like other personality traits. This review sets out to contribute to a better understanding of the functioning of implicit motives and to present a roadmap for further research.

Are the benefits of autonomy satisfaction and the costs of autonomy frustration dependent on individuals' autonomy strength?

OBJECTIVE

From a self-determination theory perspective, individuals are assumed to benefit and suffer from, respectively, the satisfaction and frustration of the psychological need for autonomy, even if they score low on autonomy strength. Yet, previous studies on need strength are scarce, operationalized need strength differently, and produced inconsistent findings.

METHOD

In two studies among 224 South African adults (M_age  = 24.13, SD = 4.25; 54.0% male) and 156 Belgian prisoners (M_age  = 38.60, SD = 11.68; 88.5% male), we investigated the moderating role of autonomy valuation and desire in the relations of autonomy satisfaction and frustration with a variety of well-being and ill-being indicators.

RESULTS

Study 1 provided some evidence for the moderating role of mostly explicit autonomy desire (rather than explicit autonomy valuation). In Study 2, neither explicit nor implicit autonomy desire played a consistent moderating role.

CONCLUSIONS

Overall, these findings are congruent with a moderate (albeit not with a strong) interpretation of the universality claim made within self-determination theory, provide initial evidence for a differentiation between deficit-based and growth-oriented interpersonal differences in need strength, and indicate that the potential moderating role of need strength deserves continued attention before any firm conclusions can be drawn.