Who Gains from Achievement Motivation Training?

Karoly Varga is Senior Research Fellow at the Sociological Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was recently involved in an evaluation of achievement motivation training programmes in several countries on behalf of UNI DO. Since the first experiment in India by McCelland and Winter (1969), work on achievement motivation development has been attempted in various cultures, and several reports are available on the results. A careful study of these reports indicate that all those who undergo specially prepared achievement motivation training programmes do not benefit equally from the programmes. McCelland and Winter attempted to provide an answer to this baffling question. An attempt has been made in this paper to find an intervening variable which may explain who benefit from achievement motivation training programmes and why.