McClelland spent most of his career at Harvard, joining in 1956 and leaving for Boston University in 1987. He is best known for achievement-motivation theory, the needs for achievement, affiliation and power, and for pushing that work outward from individual behaviour to entrepreneurship, health, and national economic development.
The 1973 American Psychologist paper is why he matters to this page. Marshalling decades of validity research, he argued that intelligence and aptitude tests did not predict job or life performance well enough to justify their use as gates, and proposed criterion sampling instead: test for the behaviour the work actually requires. Later competency-modeling literature counts it as one of several parallel streams — alongside assessment-center research dating to the World Wars, job analysis, and Gardner’s independently developed multiple-intelligences work — feeding into competency-based assessment; the term “competency” itself predates McClelland’s paper by decades, tracing to law and clinical psychology. On this page his role is narrower. He is the authority for the warning that people who hired for a role will tell you what they believe good looks like, which is a different thing from what good is. He is devoted to management-adjacent psychology rather than to management, but his paper remains one of the field’s named foundational streams.