The Impact Of Achievement Motivation On Career Decision-Making Process

Career decision-making is an important choice for every person in his life, and its result has a profound influence on personal career development and life style. Although most career psychologists emphasize decision-makers' absolute rationality in their career decision-making, the impact of motivation, especially achievement motivation as a significant influencing factor in career success, on career decision making should not be neglected. A great deal of past researches indicate that achievement motivation plays a positive role in academic and career achievement, however, few studies discuss achievement motivation in career decision-making process. So it is essential and meaningful to study the impact of achievement motivation on career decision-making process.There are two experiments in this study. One explores the effect of achievement motivation on career decision-making strategies. The result shows: 1) Career decision-making is a bounded rationality process. Decision-making's time condition has significant effect on the time of decision-making, depth of search and pattern of search in career choice, but do not have significant effect on the degree of satisfaction for choice. 2) There are different influences of achievement motivation's each dimension on career decision-making process. Motive of success produces a considerable impact on the pattern of search, and motive of avoiding failure produces a considerate impact on the depth of search.The other discusses the effect of achievement motivation on career decision-making risk tendency. The result shows: 1) There are different influences of achievement motivation's each dimension on career decision-making risk tendency. Comparison to the motive of success, the motive of avoiding failure is a more sensitive factor in predicting an individual risk tendency. 2) The negative frame has more risk preference than the positive frame, but both don't reach the significant level. 3) Achievement motivation and task frame interact with each other on career decision-making risk tendency.As a conclusion, based on these experiments above, practical implications and deficiencies are proposed, and directions for future research are discussed.