One person who is doing very interesting work in this domain at the moment is Oliver C. Schultheiss: http://www.psych2.phil.uni-erlangen.de/team/bilder-viten/cv-schultheiss.pdf

McClelland hiimself did a study on war and peace periods of USA. See e.g. Heckhausen and Heckhausen Motivation and action handbook, p. 224., where Scmalt and Heckhausen review McClelland, 1975, p. 336. (McClelland, D. C. (1975). Power: The inner experience. New York: Irvington.). Check this handbook or this one: Brunstein and Schultheiss (2010) Implicit motives. Oxford University Press.

Another key figure of the field is David Winter but I don't know any specific writing of him on power vs affiliation in social situations.

Rather remotely, we have used such a scale in educational research: Hustinx, P. Werf, G. van der, Kuyper, H., & Dijkstra, P. (2009). Achievement motivation revisited: new longitudinal data to demonstrate its predictive power. Educational Psychology, 29 (5), 561-582.

My impression is that the unidimensional concept 'achievement motivation' (or 'need for achievement') is considered 'obsolete', and has been replaced by e.g. 'achievement goals'.

Take a look at the following review paper: Winter, D. G., John, O. P., Stewart, A. J., Klohnen, E. C., & Duncan, L. E. (1998). Traits and motives: Toward an integration of two traditions in personality research. Psychological Review, 105, 230-250.

Thank you for the comments.

1) I know the works on war and peace periods of USA by McLelland - I agree with that but the dynamics of the conflict .

2) Traits vs motives + educational - I agree, but this is a study on individual success and well being.

I am more interested in conflicts in social situations. Let me describe it in terms of postulating hypotheses.

Interpersonal impacts:

H1: The interpersonal conflict is dominated by the differences in motivations (rather than traits)

H2: Due to projection bias the people assume that others put same value on achievements, affiliation and power. In everyday transactions this often leads to avoidable loss-loss situations and resulting conflict.

For shortness I will just describe 2 such situations:

Example 1: nAch helped nAff optimize his mortgages (giving results). He is now angry at nAff and stopped talking to him because nAff didn't help him back with something important due to regular football match in the evening. nAff puts more value on "helping each other" but devalues affiliation by getting angry and refusing contact. Each of them views thier position as a loss.

Example 2: nPow manager starts pushing to pursue his idea that leads to no result. This upsets both nAch and nAff people by devaluing their motives. If nAch strikes back than even nPow feels situation as a loss.

H3: Feeling of closeness (forming groups, making friends) is strongly correlated with the same motivational characteristics (rather than traits). This could be compared e.g. by who from the high school is still in contact with whom.

To continue with hypotheses on Larger Social impacts. I think it is easier to look at it 2-dimensionally (see attachement).

H1: The middle class is composed of 2 disctinct groups - people dominated by achievement or dominated by power. These groups are in conflict, have different life goals, moral systems ... In this view it is wrong to view middle class as one group as is often done.

H2: In general election systems (democracy) the success of one group is dominated by the ability to connect and persuade the nAff people.

H3: The nAch - nAff conflict seems to be much deeper than nAff - nPow conflict. In some countries (like Brasil) these people live in different parts of the city, behind walls and rarely meet. That is why there are so many pure power leaders with negative results but keep re-elected again.

H4: Liberalism is an ideal system and should be more liked by high achievers (negative towards power, no caring about well being of low nAch people). High achievers do not see why others do not like their system.

H5: Communism was eventually an idea that high achievers are the main evil (killed all self-employed, educated, skilled people). Low achievers do not acknowledge the harm made to achievers in such system. Even today in most post-communistics countries you see pure power guys in control and with large popularity.

H6: Large scale aid like EU funds, african developmental aid etc.. empower purely nPow people. The more aid - the less achievement and affiliation there is.

I know it is a lot of info - it is easier to explain face to face drawing the motivational map. Do you think this idea is worth of pursuing further? I think the more objective research is feasible and not too hard.

I work in a field of clinical research at the moment so I am looking for someone knowledgeable in this field.

David Winter (University of Michigan) has done a lot of work on this topic.

It's an interesting line of thinking, to be sure. Do be careful with your political inferences, as many of them could be specific to a particular nation's history. As I recall, it is true that while high nAch people tend to create successful enterprises, once those enterprises become sufficiently large and complex, high nPow people tend to assume dominance. A lot of the salient literature will be in the field of work motivation, arguably a branch of social psychology.

Please remember that the underlying theory was developed by Henry Murray. David McClelland studied under Murray, as did many other talented people. And most of the classic research in this tradition (including McClelland, Atkinson, and Winter) was done using the TAT method - participants write stories in response to ambiguous pictures, and the stories are coded for the presence of the motives in question. There are questionnaires for this purpose, but the correlate only modestly with TAT scores.

This approach is most "alive" nowadays in the personality field, ultimately deriving from the work of Silvan Tomkins (who started as another Murray protegee). Most of these researchers work with actual memories rather than fantasies, but the broad approach is the same - and there are several good scoring manuals for use with either type of material. Dan McAdams, Arnold Bruhn, and Jefferson SInger come to mind.