NEED FOR ACHIEVEMENT AND NEED FOR AFFILIATION: THE EXTENT TO WHICH AN INDIVIDUAL MAY HAVE BOTH SIMULTANEOUSLY

Need for achievement is the desire to accomplish difficult tasks and to meet standards of excellence. Need for affiliation is the desire to be with others and have harmonious and satisfying relationships.
 
Both, need for achievement and need for affiliation, can be very important for any individual. They can work as a guiding force in a person’s life in many ways. A need for achievement gives an incentive to have a sense of accomplishment and a need for affiliation drives a person to be with different kind of people and have many different kinds of relationships. Both help in gaining a sense of satisfaction in their own way.

There are, of course, individual differences when it comes to both need for achievement and need for affiliation. People may be high, low, or even medium in both the needs.

People who are high on need for achievement choose tasks that are moderately difficult for them. They are persistent and do not give up till they have a sense of accomplishment. They are intrinsically motivated. They do things for a sense of pleasure and satisfaction and not for extrinsic rewards like money.

They also prefer to have accurate feedback about themselves. They are clear about their strengths and weaknesses. They attribute their performance to themselves rather than circumstances. They like to take responsibility for their success as well as their failures. They prefer to be alone or with like minded people. They also like to face challenges in their life.

People who are high on need for affiliation like to spend time with others. They like to be with others. They like to form friendships and more and more intimate relationships. They try to seek out pleasure by being in the company of others.

They have a desire for acceptance and approval from others. They have a need to be liked by others. They choose work that enables them to be with more and more people and that requires social interaction. They also tend to conform to others.

Having a look at the characteristics of people who are high on need for achievement and people who are high on need for affiliation, there seems to be quite a contrast between the two. They are seemingly opposite.

Researchers suggest that need for achievement and need for affiliation are inversely proportional in an individual. This means that if a person is high on need for achievement, then he/she is low on need for affiliation and vice versa.

This, to quite an extent, is reflected by the characteristics of both high on need for achievement and affiliation. People who are high on need for achievement are introverted and basically self-involved. They are usually aloof and prefer to be alone. They may also lack in some social skills, especially the skill of cooperation. On the other hand, people who are high on need for affiliation like to be surrounded by people. They are extroverted and highly sociable. They also seem to have good people skills. Obviously, a person cannot exactly be self-involved and sociable at the same time.

Need for achievement and need for affiliation may also quite possibly work as a hindrance for each other. They may come in between one another and thus negatively effect each other.

For a person who is high on need for achievement, the desire to affiliate may cause a distraction from his/her work and accomplishments. Likewise, for a person who is high on need for affiliation, the desire to achieve success in work may put him/her away from his close relationships.This shows that the researchers may be right and that need for achievement and need for affiliation are not only inversely proportional but they rather should be inversely proportional.

All this gives an indication that need for achievement and need for affiliation are quite unrelated. But an in-depth look at need for affiliation shows that this may not exactly be true. Among all the basic reasons for different people to affiliate, one of them is to have positive stimulation and one is to compare themselves with others.

People affiliate to have interesting and lively interactions that create some sort of positive stimulation. People who are high on need for achievement prefer to be with like-minded people. This enables them to generate positive stimulation, which suggests a desire to affiliate among people who are high on need for achievement.

People affiliate to compare themselves with others to know exactly where they belong in a particular task. This reduces uncertainty among them and they are able to get some kind of feedback about themselves.

Those who are high on need for achievement also require some feedback about themselves from time to time. This shows some kind of relation between need for achievement and need for affiliation. Thus, people who are high on need for achievement can also have a need to affiliate.

There is a lot of subjectivity when it comes to human nature. Each individual differs from the other in their own right. Everyone has their own perceptions and perspectives. The desire to accomplish difficult tasks and to meet standards of excellence are qualities of those of who have a need to achieve. Each person has their own perception of task difficulty and each person might have their own standards of excellence. In this way, a person who is high on need for affiliation might also be high on need for achievement from his/her own perception and perspective.

Need for achievement and need for affiliation are more of common social needs of humans rather than being just personality traits. Everybody, to whatever extent, has the need to achieve and affiliate. There seems to be no reason at all why an individual may not be high on both need for achievement and need for affiliation.

But, as mentioned above, one may come in the way of the other. However, this does not mean that a person cannot be high on both the needs. One of the needs may suffer because of the other or probably even both may suffer, but it does not rule out in any way that a person can be high on both.

Human beings have a tendency to act according to the situation. A person may behave in a certain way in one situation and behave differently in another situation. This makes it difficult to predict the behaviour of an individual. It is quite possible that in one situation a person can be high on need for achievement and in another situation that same person can be high on need for affiliation.

An individual overall has a number of personality traits. Usually some of them are dominant and some are not. The same can be possible when it comes to need for achievement and need for affiliation. It can be that a person is high on both, but either one of them is dominant.

For instance, in an individual need for achievement may be dominant and need for affiliation may be the subordinate. Or need for affiliation may be dominant and need for achievement may be the subordinate. Thus, a person may be high on both the needs but he/she may be a little bit higher in one them. They may not be necessarily inversely proportional. There might only be a slight difference in the degree of either one of them.

Need for achievement and need for affiliation, at first might seem to be quite unrelated. But, a closer look at the two gives a different perspective. They both can be very much related and it is quite possible that an individual may be high on both need for achievement and need for affiliation.