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In this paper, Chair of Sport Psychology Members, Julia Schüler and Wanja Wolff investigated the role of individual differences on performance. Specifically, this work emphasizes that individual differences - e.g. in performance motives - must be taken into account if athletic performance is to be predicted and influenced. Importantly, it is not only situational or personal characteristics that matter, but the interaction of both. This paper shows that achievement motivated people need different instructions from the coach than people with other motivations. Their paper was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology (section Movement Science and Sport Psychology), where it will be part of a special issue called Psychological and Motor Associations in Sports Performance: A Mental Approach to Sports. The full abstract of the paper can be found below:

“An explicit achievement motive is intuitively related to good performance. In contrast, the present paper directs attention to conditions where individuals with a strong explicit achievement motive display poor performance. We hypothesized that participants with a strong achievement motive perform worse in a bicycle ergometer task when task instructions lack achievement incentives than when the instructions include achievement incentives. Furthermore, we expected that, when achievement incentives are lacking, they show even worse performance than participants with a weak achievement motive. For the latter, we assumed that they are relatively unaffected by the achievement incentive content of the instructions. In a within-subject experimental design (N = 55) with two blocks (achievement incentives vs. lack of achievement incentives; each block consisted of three trials), our hypotheses were partly supported. The lack of achievement incentives brought out the worst (regarding performance), but the presence of achievement incentives did not bring out the best of participants with a strong achievement motive. In the discussion, we suggest how to improve future experimental achievement settings and reflect the results within the framework of the differentiation into implicit and explicit motives.”

This research reflects our interest in the role person × situation fit plays for performance and wellbeing. To learn more about this line of research, click here.

The bibliographic information of the paper: Schüler, J., & Wolff, W. (2020). What brings out the best and worst of people with a strong explicit achievement motive? The role of (lack of) achievement incentives for performance in an endurance task. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 932. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00932