Many Management (sub-)disciplines, from Organizational Behavior and Marketing to Accounting and Strategy, are interested in antecedents and consequences of individual attitudes and traits. A key aspect of personality profiles are explicit and implicit motives. Yet, Management scholars mainly focus on explicit motives, with limited attention to implicit motives. We argue that this state of affairs probably came into being because current Management researchers mainly rely on implicit motive measures that are either difficult to apply or to develop, hampering researchers from applying implicit motive measures. To overcome the downsides of available instruments, we develop a Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT) as an efficient, reliable and valid measure of implicit motives, particularly the needs for achievement, affiliation and power. To explore our BIAT’s predictive validity, we apply this measure to a specific research domain within Management: Entrepreneurship. We examine implicit motives’ association with entrepreneurial self-efficacy, business founding, and financial profitability. Our results show that the introduction of implicit motives can unlock stranded discussions in this research domain. Overall, we argue that implicit motives can help to push the boundaries of the study of deep-level attributes in a wide range of organizational and managerial settings.

Abstract:We examine the fundamental tension between explicit and implicit power motives; and their combined impact on the importance attached to prosocial organizational goals in small businesses (SMEs). We show that key decision-makers with a dominant implicit power motive attach more importance to the prosocial goals of job creation and taking care of the environment in their businesses. However, we reveal that this positive relationship is moderated by their explicit power motive. Once decision-makers in SMEs consciously seek for power, the positive relationship is neutralized. With these results, we highlight the conceptual and methodological differences between implicit and explicit power motives. We could obtain these results because we developed and validated an innovative implicit motive measure-the Shortened Pictorial Attitude Implicit Association Test (SPA-IAT). Contrary to the currently available implicit motive measures, the SPA-IAT is fast and easy to use and analyze, which makes this novel instrument well suited for research in business settings.

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