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

Schüler, Julia; Wolff, Wanja (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), p. 932. Frontiers Research Foundation 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00932

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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.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

07 Faculty of Human Sciences > Institute of Education > Educational Psychology

UniBE Contributor:

Wolff, Wanja

Subjects:

300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 370 Education

ISSN:

1664-1078

Publisher:

Frontiers Research Foundation

Language:

English

Submitter:

Wanja Wolff

Date Deposited:

07 Apr 2022 15:55

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 15:49

Publisher DOI:

10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00932

PubMed ID:

32528364

Uncontrolled Keywords:

explicit achievement motive incentives motives motor performance underperformance

BORIS DOI:

10.48350/154566

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/154566

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