Yesterday, I wrote about the various factors that affect motivation in athletes. I discussed how sports psychologists maintain that motivation is broadly affected by three main factors: competence, autonomy and relatedness. I also noted that sports psychologists have classified motivation into three main categories: amotivation, extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation.
***
Types of motivation (a recap)
Sports psychologists have identified three broad categories of motivation, as follows:
- Amotivation - amotivation is the absence of any kind of motivation. The athlete displaying amotivation doesn’t really know why they engage in the sport and they don’t see any benefit in playing.
- Extrinsic motivation – extrinsic motivation is motivation that comes from an outside source. Where athletes perform because of a desire to win awards, financial benefits or simply because they have to do what their coach tells them, they are extrinsically motivated.
- Intrinsic motivation – intrinsic motivation is motivation that is derived from the desire to perform that activity or sport for its own sake and out of the athlete’s own volition.
Types of motivation and elite performance
Today, I’m going to look very briefly at a study that explores what happens to motivation when elite athletes begin to receive rewards for their high level performance.
In Motivation and elite performance: an exploratory investigation with Bulgarian athletes, Chantal, Guay, Dobreva-Martinova and Vallerand, International Journal of Sports Psychology, 1996, 98 elite Bulgarian athletes (including both men and women) were studied. The performances of the athletes were documented over a period of two years and the athletes also completed a questionnaire designed to establish their levels of motivation over the same period.
The conclusions of the study were that the most successful athletes were most likely to display higher levels of amotivation and extrinsic motivation.
This is very interesting, as the prevailing wisdom is that intrinsic motivation is more powerful and capable of propelling athletes to greater success.
In their discussion of the results, the authors of the study wondered whether the fact that the Bulgarian sporting climate was a very competitive environment that financially rewarded winning rather than effort or task mastery was conducive to selecting for those athletes who were naturally motivated by rewards and financial gain.
***
My thoughts
I would have been interested to see the motivation profiles of the same athletes before they began to receive their rewards, to see whether their profiles were similar before they began to receive benefits.
It is a well-documented psychological phenomenon that you can alter people’s perceptions of their actions by paying them (see Sidentop and Ramey, Intrinsic rewards and extrinsic motivation, 1977, where a retired psychology professor stopped children from playing outside his house by paying them to play there and then ceasing to pay them. They went and played elsewhere when he stopped paying them because they had come to believe that the payment was the reason they were there).
I therefore suspect that it is the winning (and the rewards that come with it) that causes the amotivation and extrinsic motivation. If that’s not a defence of amateur sport, I don’t know what is…
***
I’m going to do a couple of research reviews on similar sports psychology topics and I’ll put them up on this sports psychology research page.
