Action Control: The Maintenance of Motivational States

According to McClelland’s classic theory of motivation (McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, & Lowell, 1953), a moderate discrepancy between an individual’s goals and her/his current achievements is the motivating source for subsequent efforts to approach those goals. Although the model claimed that large discrepancies resulted in a decrease of motivation, I tend to believe that scientists are sometimes motivated even by extremely large discrepancies between their goals and their achievements. When Heinz Heckhausen decided to pick up the line of research initiated by Jack Atkinson (1957), he created the perfect conditions for generating an inexhaustible source of motivation for his own subsequent research activities and those of his students. This motivational potential derived from the vast discrepancy between the simplicity of Atkinson’s structural model and the complexity of Heckhausen’s process-oriented visions of a future theory of motivation. Having been directly exposed to both sides of this discrepancy during my years at Michigan and Bochum, I might have experienced even more impatience about the discrepancy between aspirations and achievements in motivation research than my colleagues there. Each of us felt the need to transcend the rigid limitations of expectancy-value theories of motivation and each of us reduced the goal discrepancy in a different way, as many chapters in this volume testify.