Taking Another Look at the Need for Achievement: Expanding the Construct Meaning and Testing its Structural Equivalence

Abstract

In their 6-country study of the need for personal achievement, Sagie, Elizur, and Yamauchi (1996) showed that the construct has basically similar multifaceted structures across cultural environments. The current study incorporates three successive variations in the construct meaning and its measurement. Firstly, on the basis of the original self-attribution items a situational questionnaire of the need for achievement was devised. Secondly, the original mapping sentence was used for tapping additional components of the need for achievement; competitiveness and perfectionism. Finally, besides the need for personal achievement, the need for collective (team) achievement was examined. It was hypothesized that despite these variations, basically equivalent structures will be found in all cases. Using Smallest Space Analysis (SSA), data collected from 611 respondents in Israel, India, and Japan, demonstrated the hypothesized structural equivalence. Mean scores of the need for personal achievement components did not vary systematically between the Israeli and Japanese samples; nevertheless, five out of the six mean scores of the need for team achievement components were higher for the Indian (more collectivistic) sample than for its Israeli (more individualistic) counterpart.