people with high achievement needs are impelled to seek challenging but realistic
objectives for their performance in competitive settings. Applied to sport, this principle
suggests that athletes who have a high need to achieve should prefer to compete against
opponents of a similar, or slightly higher, level of ability. By contrast, athletes with low
achievement motivation tend to avoid challenging situations and should prefer to
compete against opponents of lower ability levels. Despite its intuitive appeal, this theory
has made little progress in accounting for the motivational behaviour of sport performers.
This situation is attributable to two main problems. First, there is a dearth of valid
instruments available for the measurement of achievement motivation in athletes
(Roberts, Spink and Pemberton, 1999). In addition, researchers have criticised the
assumption in traditional achievement motivation theory that success and failure may be
defined objectively. Thus Maehr and Nicholls (1980) argued that these variables are
largely subjective because they are usually defined in relation to people’s perception of
goal achievement. For example, whereas some athletes may regard “success” as being
defined by defeating an opponent or winning a competition, others may perceive it in
relation to achieving a “personal best” performance or impressing their coach or parents.
Recognition of this subjective influence on people’s achievement strivings influenced
researchers to switch from a personality-based to a social-cognitive approach in the study
of motivation in athletes. This change in emphasis had important theoretical implications
for sport psychology. As Kremer, Sheehy, Reilly, Trew and Muldoon (2003) observed, it
“switched attention from the ‘what’ or content of motivation to the ‘why’ or process
whereby we are or are not motivated” (p. 188). Within the social-cognitive paradigm of
motivation research, two conceptual models deserve special mention: achievement goal
theory and attribution theory. Let us now examine each of these approaches briefly.
The social-cognitive approach: achievement goal theoryThe main assumption of the social-cognitive approach to motivation in sport is that
athletes’ behaviour in achievement situations is a consequence of their perception of
“success” in different contexts (Roberts, 2001). Put differently, this approach suggests
that in order to understand athletes’ motivation, we need to explore what success means
to them. Adopting this subjective approach, Maehr and Nicholls (1980) proposed that
success and failure “are not concrete events. They are psychological states consequent on
perception of reaching or not reaching goals” (p. 228). Within this paradigm, perhaps the
most influential model has been “achievement goal” theory (see reviews by Duda, 2001;
Duda and Hall, 2001; Weiss and Ferrer-Caja, 2002). Since this latter model has been
hailed as “the most important conceptual avenue to address motivation in sport and
physical education” (Roberts, 2001, p. 10), we need to examine its central propositions
more closely.
Achievement goal theory postulates that two main types of motivation (or “goal
orientations”) may be identified in athletes depending on how they interpret the goal of
achievement (or success). The first type of motivation is called a “task orientation”. With
this outlook, the athlete is interested mainly in subjective indices of success such as skill
learning, mastery of challenges and self-improvement. For example, a task-oriented
athlete may perceive herself or himself to be successful if s/he can perform a specific
sport skill (e.g., serving a tennis ball) better today than s/he did three weeks ago. The
Motivation and goal-setting in sport 41