Recent research has highlighted the necessity to consider implicit motives in the business context. In practice, implicit motives have gained popularity for employee selection or promotion processes since the exclusive use of visible skills and qualifications turned out to be inefficient for the prediction of long-term work motivation. Practical experience shows that implicit motive types possess individually different sets of strengths and weaknesses. This study, with more than 150 participating executives, raises possibilities of a somewhat more expansive view of implicit motive theory in the business environment by empirically investigating the extent of managerial skills that is comprised in each of the five implicit motive types named achievement, affiliation, autonomy, vision and competition.