ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION

ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION

Achievement motivation is the desire to do better, to achieve unique accomplishment, to compete with a standard of excellence, and to involve oneself with long term achievement goals. It is the desire to accomplish difficult tasks and meet standards of excellence.    

Achievement motivation is a person’s orientation to strive for task success, persist in the face of failure, and experience the pride in accomplishment. Achievement motivation in sport is commonly called competitiveness. Competitiveness is a disposition to strive for satisfaction when making comparisons with some standard of excellence in the presence of evaluative others. These ideas are of great importance because they give us an understanding of why certain individuals seem so motivated and others just seem to go with the flow.

DEFINITIONS OF ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION

Atkinson and Feather (1966): Achievement Motivation is a combination of two personality variables: tendency to approach success and tendency to avoid failure.

Bigge and Hunt (1980) defined achievement motivation as the drive to work with diligence and vitality, to constantly steer toward targets, to obtain dominance in challenging and difficult tasks and create sense of achievement as a result.

CHARACTERISTICS OF ACHEVEMENT MOTIVATION

v It is manifested only when the individual perceives performance as instrumental to a sense of a personal accomplishment.

v It is conditioned by one’s early training, experiences and subsequent learning.

v It involves an exalted self-esteem and self image.

v It is a learned motive acquired in the process of growing up and living in a society.

v It is an intense desire to perform with excellence for its own sake.

v Achievement motivation includes need for success as well as need to avoid failure.

v It is an overcome of social learning and reinforcements which individual have experienced.

  

THEORY OF ACHEVEMENT MOTIVATION

The theory of achievement motivation has been developed by David.C.McCllend and John .W. Atkinson. The achievement motivation theory supports the idea that actions are driven by the motivation to meet or exceed a certain standard of excellence perceived by the individual or society as a whole, when considered from a macro perspective. The need to achieve or meet a certain standard of excellence is thought to have derived from the first years of a child's life as the result of the way parents expect or reward independent action in their children. Thus, achievement motivation as a personality characteristic is not necessarily the same in each person.

For children who were greatly rewarded for independence, achievement motivation factors more highly in their cognitive processes, while children who were neglected do not have a history of feeling pride in meeting a certain standard of excellence. Atkinson and McClelland believed that when children are properly motivated, the emotional arousal that occurs within the unconscious becomes stronger when a child is challenged with the possibly of success.

There are four achievement motivation theories; these theories explain what motivates people to act. The theories are as follows:

v Need Achievement Theory

v Attribution Theory

v Achievement and Goal Theory

v Competence Motivation Theory

(a).Need Achievement Theory

Need achievement theory (Atkinson & McClelland) is an interactional view that takes into consideration personal and situational factors as important predictors of behaviour. This theory consists of five components, they are as follows:

F Personality or Motives

F Situational Factors

F Resultant Tendencies

F Emotional Reactions

F Achievement-related behaviour

(b). Attribution Theory

Attribution theory Heider and extended and popularized by Weiner. This theory proposes that every individual tries to explain success or failure of self and others by offering certain “attributions”. The most fundamental attribution categories are stability (a factor to which one attributes success or failure is either fairly permanent or unstable), Locus of casualty (a factor is either external or internal to the individual), and locus of control (a factor is or is not under control).

(c). Achievement Goal Theory

 Achievement goal theory is of the belief that three factors interact to determine an individual’s motivation, these are as follows: achievement goals, perceived ability and achievement behaviour.

• Achievement goals, outcome-orientated goals and task orientated goals.

 • Perceived ability, High perceived ability or competence. Low perceived ability or competence.

• Achievement behaviour, performance, effort, persistence, task choice, realistic task or opponents and unrealistic task or opponents.

(d). Competence Motivation Theory

 According to White, we are born with a competence motive, which is the need to confirm our sense of personal competence This need motivates us to explore our environment and learn how to deal effectively with it because it is intrinsically rewarding and satisfying to feel that we are capable human beings, with the ability to understand, predict and control our world.

Together these theories propose that high and low achievers can be distinguished by their motives, the tasks they select to be evaluated on, the effort they exert during competition, their persistence, and their performance.