has acquired, In summary, achievement goal theory is plagued by conceptual and
methodological issues.
Critical thinking questions
Does a typology like task- versus ego-oriented motivation really explain anything—or
is it merely a convenient way of classifying behaviour? What specific predictions does
goal achievement theory make about the relationship between goal orientation and
athletic performance? As there are many anecdotal examples of elite athletes with
prominent ego orientations (e.g., John McEnroe), is this type of goal perspective
necessarily a bad thing for athletes?
Having reviewed research on achievement goal theory, let us now turn to the second of
the social-cognitive approaches to motivation in sport psychology—namely, attribution
theory or the study of how people construct explanations for the successes and failures
which they experience.
Social-cognitive approach: attribution theoryAttribution theory is a vibrant research field in mainstream psychology that explores
people’s explanations for the causes of events and behaviour. Although space limitations
preclude detailed coverage of this field, see Biddle and Hanrahan (1998), Biddle,
Hanrahan and Sellars (2001) and McAuley and Blissmer (2002) for recent reviews of
attributional research in sport psychology. Before outlining the attributional approach to
motivation in athletes, some background information on this theory is required.
Put simply, the term attribution (which is associated with Heider, 1958, one of the
progenitors of this field) refers to the cause or reason which people propose when they try
to explain why something happened to them. For example, a tennis player may attribute
her victory over an opponent in a long match to her own “never say die” attitude on court.
Conversely, the manager of a football team may ascribe a defeat to some misfortune over
which s/he had no control (e.g., a series of unfair refereeing decisions during the match).
There is an important difference between these two examples of attribution, however. In
the first case, the tennis player’s attribution is made to a personal quality—namely, her
high motivation—whereas in the second case, the football manager’s attribution is made
to an external cause (the referee). This distinction highlights the difference between
internal or “dispositional” attributions (i.e., explanations that invoke stable individual
personality characteristics of the person in question) and external or “situational”
attributions (i.e., explanations that refer to environmental causes of a given outcome or
event). Attributions may also vary in dimensions other than this one of internal versus
external locus of causality. Thus some attribution theorists postulate that people’s
explanations for events vary in stability (i.e., whether the perceived cause is consistent or
variable over time) as well as controllability (i.e., the degree to which the person
involved—the “actor”—could exert personal influence over the outcome in question).
Motivation and goal-setting in sport 45