Measurement of the implicit and explicit achievement motive: New perspectives

A lot of attention is lately drawn to the measurement of implicit
and explicit achievement motives as two distinct but
intercorrelated systems. The general line of research indicates
that correlations between the Picture Story Exercise (PSE) and
self-report questionnaires which assess implicit and explicit
achievement constructs respectively are normally very low and
nonsignificant. The new approach to the measurement of the explicit
motives violates this assumption and consists in the construction
of the cue- and response-matched questionnaire version of the PSE
(PSE-Q) which might correlate significantly with the PSE. The first
goal of the current study was to explore this new line of thinking
by constructing a PSE-Q for the measurement of the explicit
achievement motive based on the original scoring key by McClelland
et al. (1953) and validating it with a traditional measure of the
explicit achievement motive, LMI-K (Schuler & Prochaska, 2001),
as well as with academic success criterion, such as grade point
average (GPA). The second goal of the current study was to increase
the number of picture cues available for eliciting implicit
achievement motive imagery, thus, four new picture cues were
introduced in the PSE. Three personality measures—PSE, LMI-K, and
PSE-Q, were completed in one testing session by the group of 134
participants online. Results indicated that all new picture cues
were suitable for the measurement of the implicit achievement
motive. No significant correlations were obtained between the PSE
and LMI-K. Correlations between the PSE and the PSE–Q were found to
be significant, whereas, LMI-K showed significant variance overlap
with the PSE-Q. In line with the established research, academic
success (GPA) was significanlty predicted by the explicit
achievement motive measured with LMI-K. These findings suggest that
implicit and explicit achievement motives are distinct but related
constructs.