Intrinsic, extrinsic & achievement motivation

Motivation is the internal drive to pursue and persist with a goal. It comes in two forms:

• Intrinsic motivation — driven from within by enjoyment, personal satisfaction and the pride of mastering a skill.
• Extrinsic motivation — driven from outside by rewards, whether tangible (trophies, prize money) or intangible (praise, status).

Achievement motivation, developed by Atkinson and McClelland, describes how strongly a person is drawn to competitive, testing situations. It contrasts two tendencies:

• Need to achieve (NACH) — motivated by success, welcomes a challenge, persists after setbacks; shows approach behaviour.
• Need to avoid failure (NAF) — motivated by fear of failing and being judged; opts out of hard, evaluative tasks; shows avoidance behaviour.

Key point: a high-NACH performer prefers tasks of moderate difficulty (about a 50/50 chance) because they offer a real, satisfying test — winning an easy task or losing an impossible one proves little.

Which is intrinsic motivation?

Arousal & performance

Arousal is a state of physical and mental readiness ranging from deep sleep to intense excitement. Three theories link it to performance:

• Drive theory (Hull): performance rises linearly with arousal. The more aroused you are, the more likely your dominant response appears — the well-learned skill for an expert, but often an error for a beginner.
• Inverted-U hypothesis (Yerkes-Dodson): performance is maximised at a moderate optimum; too little or too much arousal both drag it down, tracing an upside-down U.
• Catastrophe theory (Fazey & Hardy): builds on the inverted-U by adding cognitive anxiety. When worry is high and arousal crosses a threshold, performance collapses sharply rather than easing off.

Practical link: a darts player near their optimum is composed; push arousal too high while they are already anxious and, under catastrophe theory, the throw can fall apart completely.

What does drive theory predict?

Anxiety: state, trait, somatic, cognitive

Anxiety is a negative response to a threat. Learn these distinctions:

• State (A-state) — temporary anxiety in a specific moment, e.g. taking a decisive penalty. Trait (A-trait) — a stable disposition to view many situations as threatening.
• Somatic anxiety — the body's response: racing heart, sweating, tense muscles, nausea. Cognitive anxiety — the mind's response: worry, doubt, negative thoughts. Behavioural signs — fidgeting, pacing, rushing or avoidance.

Measuring anxiety: Martens' SCAT (Sport Competition Anxiety Test) is a questionnaire that assesses trait competitive anxiety. Anxiety can also be read through observation and physiological measures such as heart rate.

Somatic, cognitive or behavioural?

Tap a symptom, then tap the type of anxiety it shows.

Theories of aggression

Aggression is behaviour intended to harm, outside the rules. Four theories and their authors:

• Instinct theory (Lorenz): aggression is innate and builds up until released; sport can act as a cathartic outlet.
• Frustration-aggression hypothesis (Dollard et al.): a blocked goal causes frustration, and frustration causes aggression; releasing it is cathartic.
• Aggressive-cue hypothesis (Berkowitz): frustration only creates a readiness for aggression; it is expressed only when learned cues (an opponent, an object, a provocative setting) are present.
• Social learning theory (Bandura): aggression is learned by watching and imitating role models whose aggression is reinforced.

Watch the distinction: Dollard says frustration is enough; Berkowitz corrects this to say a cue must also be present, which is why frustration does not always spill into aggression.

Where did the aggression come from?

Personality theories

Does personality stay fixed, or shift with the situation?

• Trait theories (Eysenck): personality is built from stable, largely inherited traits, mapped on extroversion–introversion and neuroticism–stability. The Type A / Type B model likewise treats personality as a fixed type (A = competitive, impatient; B = relaxed, tolerant).
• Social learning (Bandura): behaviour is learned from others and therefore varies by situation.
• Interactionist (Hollander): behaviour arises from the person interacting with the environment. Lewin summed this up as B = f(P, E).

Most accepted: the interactionist approach best explains real sport — a normally calm player may retaliate in a fierce local derby because the situation interacts with their traits.

Attribution theory (Weiner)

Weiner explained how performers explain their results, placing each reason on two key dimensions (with a third):

• Locus of causality — internal (ability, effort) or external (task difficulty, luck).
• Stability — stable (ability, task difficulty) or unstable (effort, luck).
• Controllability — within the performer's control (effort) or not (luck).

These explanations shape future effort. Persistently blaming failure on internal, stable, uncontrollable causes ("I simply lack the ability") breeds learned helplessness — the belief that failure cannot be avoided, so effort stops. The self-serving bias is the opposite protective habit: crediting success to yourself but blaming failure on outside factors.

Coaching use: steer athletes to attribute setbacks to effort (internal, unstable, controllable). It keeps improvement within their power and blocks learned helplessness.

Down the wrong attribution path

Self-confidence & self-efficacy

Self-efficacy is the confidence you hold in your ability to succeed at a particular task. Bandura named four sources:

• Performance accomplishments — your own past successes (the most powerful source).
• Vicarious experience — seeing similar others succeed at the task.
• Verbal persuasion — encouragement from coaches, team-mates and supporters.
• Emotional / physiological arousal — reading your own arousal as excitement and readiness rather than threat.

Vealey's model of sport confidence proposes that trait sport confidence and a performer's competitive orientation, applied to an objective sporting situation, generate state sport confidence, which drives performance and then feeds back into future confidence.

Coaching tip: guarantee some early success so athletes bank performance accomplishments — the strongest builder of efficacy — before you raise the difficulty.

Match the concept to its theorist

Tap a concept on the left, then the psychologist who proposed it.

Group dynamics, leadership & social facilitation

Steiner's model of team productivity:

• Faulty processes are co-ordination losses (poor teamwork, tactics) and motivational losses. Social loafing is when a member reduces effort because their individual contribution cannot be identified.
• The Ringelmann effect — mean individual effort declines as group size grows, first shown in a rope-pulling experiment.
• Leadership — Chelladurai's multi-dimensional model: performance and satisfaction depend on the match between the leader's required, preferred and actual behaviour, influenced by the situation, leader and members. Leaders may be autocratic or democratic, and prescribed (appointed) or emergent (chosen by the group).
• Social facilitation (Zajonc): the mere presence of others raises arousal and brings out the dominant response — a boost for experts, a hindrance for novices. Cottrell argued the driver is evaluation apprehension — the sense of being judged — not presence alone.

Hidden in the crew

The big ideas to know

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