Sport And Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction

Having considered the nature and types of motivation, let us now review the main
theoretical approaches to this construct in sport and exercise psychology.

Theories of motivation: from personality to cognition

Historically, two major theoretical approaches have dominated research on motivational
processes in sport and exercise over the past fifty years—the personality model
(epitomised by research on individual differences in people’s need for achievement) and
two social-cognitive models (including the goal-orientation approach and attribution
theory). Perhaps the most important difference between these two approaches is that
whereas personality theorists view people as being driven by deep-seated psychological
needs, social-cognitive researchers are more concerned with understanding how people’s
thoughts and perceptions guide their behaviour. Another difference between these
approaches is that whereas personality theorists are concerned mainly with the origins of
people’s achievement strivings (i.e., the past determinants of their needs), cognitive
motivational researchers are more interested in people’s choice of future actions (Roberts,
2001). Let us now review the theoretical rationale of each of these approaches in more
detail.

The personality approach

Initially, sport psychologists tried to account for athletes’ motivational processes by
referring to two types of variables—innate instincts and learned drives. Superficially,
such theories seem plausible. For example, aggressive behaviour on the football field is
commonly attributed to the possession of an aggressive nature. But on closer inspection,
this approach is flawed by circularity of reasoning. The difficulty here is that any
scientific explanation for a phenomenon must be independent of the phenomenon itself.
Otherwise, one unknown variable is used to “explain” another. This problem of
proposing circular explanations for people’s behaviour has a long history and was
satirised by Molière in La Malade Imaginaire when he made fun of doctors who had
suggested that what gives opium its soporific quality is its “virtus dormitiva”—or
soporific quality! In a similar vein, aggressive actions cannot be explained adequately by
appealing to hypothetical aggressive instincts—because the existence of these instincts
depends on evidence of aggressive behaviour. On logical grounds, therefore, instinct
theories of motivation have been discredited significantly in psychology.
Following the demise of instinct theory, sport psychologists turned to personality
traits in an effort to account for motivational phenomena. One trait of particular interest
was a construct called “need for achievement” (see McClelland, Atkinson, Clark and
Lowell, 1953). Briefly, this trait was believed to be elicited by situations involving
approach-avoidance conflicts. In such situations, people face a dilemma in which their
natural desire to achieve success (i.e., their “need to achieve”) is challenged by their fear
of failure. Theoretically, athletes were said to have a relatively high level of achievement
motivation if their need to achieve was greater than their fear of failure. Conversely, they
were alleged to have a relatively low level of achievement motivation when their fear of
failure exceeded their desire to succeed. According to McClelland and his colleagues,

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