Identifying Achievement-Motive Types with CFA: Reading the Work Style Test Battery as a New Tool for Measuring the Achievement Motive

For a long time researchers tried to swap out the story-based TAT measures of hope for success and fear of failure for simpler questionnaire formats. Those swaps did not hold up. What did work was a later line of effort that tried to keep the strengths of both approaches at once, the Multi-Motive-Grid being one example. There is, though, a third option that has stayed largely unused in achievement-motive research: the objective test in Cattell's sense. This study takes up that option and presents Work Style, a short test battery that runs on a computer and measures achievement-motive variables through the aspiration-level paradigm.

The reasoning behind the measure runs roughly like this. People set their performance goals against internal standards, which is to say mastery goals. But once their performance gets compared with that of others, the pull toward a performance goal becomes hard to resist, and many subjects switch. Work Style sorts people into three groups on this basis: those driven by the hope of success, those held back by fear of failure, and those whose main concern is simply to avoid failure. Configural Frequency Analysis is what pulls these groupings out as distinct types rather than imposing them in advance.

One question the paper puts on the table is whether the test captures a stable underlying achievement motivation or something closer to the motivation of the moment. To get at this, CFA types drawn from samples that took the test under different motivational conditions are set side by side and compared.

The types were also checked against several intelligence tests and against personality scores from the NEO-FFI. Differences turned up on the Complex Rule Recognition test, the Matrices, and a Mathematical Task, and on two personality dimensions, Openness for Experience and Conscientiousness.