Question

How can McClelland's theory be used to motivate healthcare employees? What are some examples of what they could do to motivate them through each category of achievement, power, and affiliation?

Answer 1

McClelland's or learned needs theory is built on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory identifying three primary motivators of achievement, affiliation and power to motivate individuals. In a healthcare context, the employee’s characteristics must be identified and their driving forces of motivation must be identified into three broad categories suggested by McClelland's theory.

In the case of achievement-oriented persons, setting challenging goals to accomplish is an example to motivate the staff. The important aspect of this example of setting challenging goals is to fit their skills to the jobs. A person’s skillsets help in achieving the challenging goals and a Harvard business review research indicates that healthcare employees possessing the required skill sets performed 35% better than other employees. Another example is to provide positive feedback to the healthcare employees and reprimanding them when doing mistakes. This will make them feel valuable and aim to become achievement-oriented persons through simple encouragement and staying optimistic. Personalized feedback on the scheduled weekly meetings fosters positive relationships with nurses and improves their performance considerably

In the case of affiliation oriented persons, the healthcare employees are made to work in groups of similar jobs mostly with achievers. This provides motivation in top-performing nurses motivating others to provide superior care. The group setting or work environment fosters collaboration and extrinsic motivation examples like giving gift cards, bonus, incentives and free dinners to the team motivate the affiliation oriented persons to a great extent

In the case of power-oriented persons, the healthcare employees especially nurse should be given freedom to a certain extent to exercise their autonomy in the workplace. This example of providing autonomy to a certain extent will keep the employees focused and engaged in their job with freedom. If the employees feel that their freedom is lost, there are high chances of employee turnover