Motivation & achievement motivation

Motivation is the drive to begin and keep going with a behaviour. Two forms:

• Intrinsic — from within: enjoyment, satisfaction, the pride of getting better.
• Extrinsic — from outside: tangible rewards (medals, money) and intangible ones (praise, recognition).

Achievement motivation (Atkinson and McClelland) explains how far someone seeks out competitive, evaluative situations, contrasting two tendencies:

• Need to achieve (NACH) — welcomes challenge, unafraid of failure, takes responsibility; shows approach behaviour.
• Need to avoid failure (NAF) — fears being judged, sidesteps difficult tasks; shows avoidance behaviour.

Task choice tells you a lot: NACH performers pick tasks of moderate difficulty (a genuine 50/50 test), whereas NAF performers pick very easy tasks (safe) or very hard ones (no shame in losing).

How does a NAF performer react?

Personality theories

How much does personality stay fixed, and how well does it predict behaviour?

• Trait theories (Eysenck): personality is a set of stable, largely inherited traits, mapped on extroversion–introversion and neuroticism–stability. The Type A / Type B idea also treats personality as a fixed type (A = driven, impatient; B = calm, easy-going).
• Social learning (Bandura): behaviour is learned by observing and imitating others, so it changes with the situation.
• Interactionist (Hollander): behaviour comes from the person interacting with the environment. Lewin expressed it as B = f(P, E).

Why interactionist wins: it explains why a usually composed athlete may lose their temper in a hostile away fixture — the situation interacts with their underlying traits.

Arousal & performance

Arousal is the degree of physiological and psychological activation. Three theories link it to performance:

• Drive theory (Hull): performance rises in a straight line with arousal, and the dominant response emerges — the grooved skill for an expert, an error for a novice.
• Inverted-U hypothesis (Yerkes-Dodson): performance is best at a moderate optimum; both under- and over-arousal reduce it, forming an upside-down U.
• Catastrophe theory (Fazey & Hardy): adds cognitive anxiety to the inverted-U — when worry is high and arousal passes a threshold, performance drops dramatically instead of gradually.

Where is performance best?

State, trait, somatic & cognitive anxiety

Anxiety is a negative emotional response to a perceived threat. Two key splits:

• State (A-state) — momentary anxiety in a specific situation (a match point). Trait (A-trait) — an enduring disposition to perceive many situations as threatening.
• Somatic anxiety — physiological signs (raised heart rate, sweating, tension). Cognitive anxiety — mental signs (worry, doubt, poor concentration).

Measuring it: Martens' SCAT (Sport Competition Anxiety Test) is a questionnaire assessing competitive trait anxiety; anxiety can also be observed or read physiologically.

State or trait?

Theories of aggression

Aggression is intent to harm outside the rules. Four theories, four authors:

• Instinct theory (Lorenz): aggression is innate and builds up until released — sport as a cathartic outlet.
• Frustration-aggression hypothesis (Dollard et al.): a blocked goal produces frustration, which produces aggression; its release is cathartic.
• Aggressive-cue hypothesis (Berkowitz): frustration creates only a readiness for aggression, expressed only when learned cues are present.
• Social learning theory (Bandura): aggression is learned by watching and imitating reinforced role models.

Key refinement: Berkowitz corrects Dollard — frustration alone is not enough; an environmental cue must be present for aggression to appear.

Attribution theory (Weiner)

Weiner described how performers explain success and failure, placing each reason on two main dimensions (plus a third):

• Locus of causality — internal (ability, effort) or external (task difficulty, luck).
• Stability — stable (ability, task difficulty) or unstable (effort, luck).
• Controllability — controllable (effort) or not (luck).

Attributions steer future motivation. Repeatedly explaining failure with internal, stable, uncontrollable causes leads to learned helplessness — the belief that failure is unavoidable. The self-serving bias is crediting success internally while blaming failure externally, protecting self-esteem.

Coaching use: point athletes towards effort (internal, unstable, controllable) so improvement stays in their hands and learned helplessness is avoided.

Self-confidence & self-efficacy

Self-efficacy is the belief in your ability to succeed at a specific task. Bandura gave four sources:

• Performance accomplishments — your own past success (the strongest source).
• Vicarious experience — watching similar others succeed.
• Verbal persuasion — encouragement from coaches, team-mates and crowds.
• Emotional / physiological arousal — reading your own arousal as readiness, not fear.

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

Coaching tip: build in early success to bank performance accomplishments — the most powerful source — before increasing the challenge.

The strongest source

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 group productivity:

• Faulty processes are co-ordination losses (poor teamwork) and motivational losses. Social loafing is reduced effort when a member's contribution cannot be identified.
• The Ringelmann effect — average individual effort drops as group size rises (first seen in a rope-pulling task).
• Leadership — Chelladurai's multi-dimensional model: effectiveness and satisfaction depend on the match between the leader's required, preferred and actual behaviour, shaped by the situation, leader and members. Leaders may be autocratic or democratic, and prescribed (appointed) or emergent (from within the group).
• Social facilitation (Zajonc): the presence of others raises arousal and brings out the dominant response — helping experts, hindering novices. Cottrell refined this: the true driver is evaluation apprehension (the fear of being judged), not presence alone.

Whose idea is it?

Tap a statement, then tap the theorist it belongs to.

Cottrell's refinement

The big ideas to know

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