Research shows that an ethos celebrating individual achievement has been shoving aside other motivations that are essential for successful leadership.

The desire to achieve is a major source of strength in business, both for individual managers and for the organisations they lead. It generates passion and energy, which fuel growth and help companies sustain performance over the long term. And the achievement drive is on the rise. Businesses have benefited from this trend. Productivity has risen, and innovation, as measured by the number of patents issued per year, has soared.

In the short term, through sheer drive and determination, overachieving leaders may be very successful, but there's a dark side to the achievement motive. By relentlessly focusing on tasks and goals – revenue or sales targets, say – an executive or company can, over time, damage performance. Overachievers tend to command and coerce, rather than coach and collaborate, thus stifling subordinates. They take frequent shortcuts and forget to communicate crucial information, and they may be oblivious to the concerns of others. Their teams' performance begins to suffer, and they risk missing the very goals that initially triggered the achievement-oriented behaviour.

Too intense a focus on achievement can demolish trust and undermine morale, measurably reducing workplace productivity and eroding confidence in management, both inside and outside the corporation. While profits and innovation have risen during the past decade, public trust in big business has slid. Many talented leaders crash and burn as they put ever more pressure on their employees and themselves to produce.

On the surface, controlling achievement overdrive sounds like Management 101: Be less coercive and more collaborative. Influence rather than direct. Focus more on people and less on numbers and results. Easy to say, difficult to master. Experienced, successful executives who should know better fall into overachie-vement mode again and again. In this article, we'll offer ways for managers to identify achievement overdrive in themselves and others and keep the destructive aspects in check. But first, let's look at the achievement motive and see how it affects the workplace.

The growing drive to achieve
The drive to achieve is tough to resist. Most people in Western cultures are taught from early childhood to value achievement. For some people, the drive seems innate. They don't just know achievement is important, they feel it.

Accomplishment is a natural high for them. Just ask admitted overachiever Karin Mayhew, who is senior vice president of organisation effectiveness for Health Net, a large managed-care company. "I start to feel really good," she says of those moments when her achievement drive kicks into high gear and she feels a mounting sense of accomplishment. At such times, she says, she is excited and happy.

David McClelland, the late Harvard psychologist, spent much of his career studying motivation and how it affects leadership behaviour. He identified achievement – meeting or exceeding a standard of excellence or improving personal performance – as one of three internal drivers (he called them social motives) that explain how we behave.

The other two are affiliation – maintaining close personal relationships – and power, which involves being strong and influencing or having an impact on others. He said the power motive comes in two forms: personalised – the leader draws strength from controlling others and making them feel weak; and socialised – the leader's strength comes from empowering people. Studies show that great charismatic leaders are highly moti-vated by socialised power; personalised power is often associated with the exploitation of subordinates.

McClelland's research showed that all three motives are present to some extent in everyone. Although we are not usually conscious of them, they give rise in us to needs and concerns that lead to certain behaviours. Meeting those needs gives us a sense of satisfaction and energises us, so we keep repeating the behaviours, whether or not they result in the outcomes we desire.

McClelland initially believed that of the three motives, achievement was the most critical to organisational, even national, success. In The Achieving Society, his seminal study on the subject, first published in 1961, he reported that a high concern with achievement within a country was followed by rapid national growth, while a drop led to a decline in economic welfare. In another study, he reported a direct correlation between the number of patents generated in a country and the level of achievement as a motivation.

But McClelland also recognised the downside of achievement: the tendencies to cheat and cut corners and to leave people out of the loop. Some high achievers "are so fixated on finding a shortcut to the goal," he noted, "that they may not be too particular about the means they use to reach it." In later work, he argued that the most effective leaders were primarily motivated by socialised power. They channelled their efforts into helping others be successful.

If you're an overachiever seeking to broaden your range, you can study your actions and ask your team, peers, and manager to give you honest feedback. You can adopt specific new behaviours, such as engaging your team in a discussion of how to achieve goals, rather than issuing a set of directives. The company can play a part, too: knowing when to draw on the achievement drive and when to rein it in.

The six styles of leadership
Despite the advantages of an achievement mentality, executives who are overly motivated to achieve can weaken a company's or group's working climate and in turn its ability to perform well. That is because a leader's motives affect the way he or she leads. Over the years, researchers have identified six styles of leadership that managers and executives use to motivate, reward, direct, and develop others.

These are directive, which entails strong, sometimes coercive behaviour; visionary, which focuses on clarity and communication; affiliative, which emphasises harmony and relationships; participative, which is collaborative and democratic; pacesetting, which is characterised by personal heroics; and coaching, which focuses on long-term development and mentoring.

There is no one best style of leadership. Each has its strengths and its limits. The directive approach, for instance, is useful in crises or when a leader must manage a poor performer, but overuse stifles initiative and innovation.

The affiliative approach is appropriate in certain high-stress situations or when employees are beset by personal crises, but it is most effective when used in conjunction with the visionary, participative, or coaching styles. Pacesetting can get results in the short term, but it's demoralising to employees and exhausting for everyone over the long haul.

The most effective leaders are adept at all six leadership styles and use each when appropriate. Typically, however, a manager defaults to the styles he or she is most comfortable using, a preference that reflects the person's dominant motive combined with the level of pressure in the workplace. People motivated mainly by achievement tend to favour pacesetting in low-pressure situations but to become directive when the pressure is on.

Recognising your motives
The good news about achievers is that when given a goal, they pull out all the stops to reach it – even if the goal is to manage their achievement drive. For an overachiever seeking to broaden his or her range, the first step is to become aware of how motives influence leadership style.

If you're seeking to assess yourself as a manager, there are calibrated tools for measuring the three leadership motives, but you can get a good sense of which drive is dominant in you simply by examining the activities you like and why.

• People with high achievement drives tend to like challenging projects that allow them to accomplish something new. It may be as simple as stamp collecting or as difficult as getting a PhD in history. One executive we're working with is spending all of his spare time training for a spot on a Senior Olympics swim team. They also like to outperform people who represent a high standard of excellence. Achievers tend to be utilitarian in their communication – often brief and to the point.
  
• Those high in affiliation are energised by personal relationships. They like to spend time with family and friends and are attracted to group activities, largely for the opportunities to build relationships. They make heavy use of the phone and e-mail just to stay connected.
  
• People mainly motivated by personalised power need to feel strong and to be seen as important. They tend to be driven by status and image. They often seek status symbols (the right car, neighbourhood, clothes) and engage in prestigious activities (dining at the right club with the right circle of friends).
  
• Individuals mainly driven by socialised power enjoy making a positive impact. They get satisfaction from helping people feel stronger and more capable; they're often energised by team activities. They like to advise and assist, whether or not the advice is wanted or needed. Such people are often attracted to teaching or politics and tend to be charismatic leaders.

Changing the culture
While behaviour is the responsibility of the individual, organisations play a role, if sometimes unintentionally, in influencing executives' actions. Some of the well known companies unabashedly create cultures that foster and reward the achievement-at-all-costs mentality.

Most organisations are less calculating. They simply select and promote high achievers for their obvious assets, let nature take its course, and then look the other way as long as the numbers are good.

Of course, a high achievement drive is still a source of strength. But companies must learn when to draw on it and when to rein it in. The challenge for managers today, then, is to return some of the balance McClelland advised, seeking an approach to leadership that uses socialised power to keep achievement in check.

Harvard Business School Publishing. Copyright 2006. (Distributed by New York Times Special Features) http://hmu.harvardbusinessonline.org