Unit 5: Psychological Needs and Achievement Motivation in Sports

What are the 3 aspects of motivation that we seek to analyze?

1. The intensity with which athletes are using to achieve their objectives

2. Where they direct that intensity of work - direction of effort

3. Persistence and maintenance of motivation over timeWha

What are the 4 basic needs of athletes?

1. Need for affiliation - establish, maintain, renew, or reinforce the affective and emotional bonds that unite them to others in their sport

2. Need for power - desire to influence the behavior of others

3. Need for achievement - desire to achieve standards of excellence

4. Need for self-realization - need to reach personal standards

What motives are the basis of the theory of self-determination and motivation

competence, autonomy, and relationship

What is the Achievement Motivation Theory

2 main variables that help explain the behavior of people in achievement environments

1. Personal (subdivided into motivation to achieve success and to experience feeling of pride and competence or the motivation to not experience failure and avoidance of shame)

2. Situational (the probability that is granted to the achievement of victory and the associated value that is granted)

How does one measure the amount of success motivation and failure avoidance?

Assess each of these two dimensions and compare them with each other

C = Ms - Mf

(C = competitiveness, Ms = motivation for success, Mf = motivation to avoid failure)

How does one measure tendency to achieve?

TA = (Ms x Ps x Is) ± (Maf x Pf x If)

First parenthesis encompasses factors considered to approximate success; second refers to those of avoidance of failure

• Ms = disposition of the personalty taken as a need for achievement that the player has that can be evaluated using the TAT (thematic apperception test)

• Ps = subjective probability that the player has or expectation that has formed that, if they play the match according to their abilities, they will reach the objective that is proposed (i.e., victory)

• Is = the subjective value that is given to success. This factor is closely linked to the difficulty of the match or the objective (can be defined as 1- Ps)

• Maf = the disposition of the personality taken as a tendency to avoid failure and that can be evaluated from the score obtained on the anxiety questionnaire

• Pf = the subjective probability thaat the player has or expectation that is formed that, if they play according to ability, they will not reach the objective, and therefore fail

• If = the subjective value that is given to failure (1-Pf)

Define the Gonzalez (1992) questionnaire

Aims to establish a score based on the quantification of the motivational tendency toward success and the avoidance of failure, establishing a value for the level of competitiveness found in each athlete

If the differential score is positive, the motivation for success is greater than that of avoiding failure and vice versa

Valence of score matters (high + means more competitive, etc)

Once an athlete has been evaluated and their relationship between the tendency to succeed and the fair of failure is obtained, what happens?

An approach to the theory of self-efficacy can be made to make predictions about how they will act in specific situations, considering that they have the option to choose or avoid them

This analysis focuses on opportunity, effort, and persistence

Define opportunity

the individual decision to approach or avoid competition situations

• athletes who have obtained a high score in competitiveness will choose to participate in situations that challenge and test their abilities

• those with a negative score will avoid them

Define effort

intensity put into achieving the objective that the athlete proposes

• those with greater differences between Mp - Mf spend more effort in achieving the proposed objective

Define persistence

Resistance that the athlete opposes to the abandonment of the objective that had been set

• high competitors tend to persist as long as they can succeed

• low competitors do not persist if they can avoid the competition

Athletes with greater tendency to succeed prefer to play in what kind of competitions?

Competitions with an intermediate difficulty where they can test themselves with “teams or rivals” of their category

Athletes with a pronounced tendency to avoid failure prefer to play in what kind of competition?

Competitions against clearly inferior or clearly superior rivals which their own abilities are not questioned and where failure (for a much superior rival) or victory (for inferior) are the results that are expected based on established expectations of self efficacy