Motives have an unconscious as well as a conscious level and lie between one’s own attitude and drives. Motives in sports are either related to the sport itself or to the result. Such a result can be understood as performance as self-affirmation, but also as presentation of one’s own performance and included dominance behavior.
Furthermore, sports can serve as a means for other purposes, such as making contacts and friendships. If the motive of an athlete is related to the sport itself, this can be the physical challenge, the aesthetics or the own body experience. However, if it serves as a means for further purposes, the maintenance of one’s own health, fitness, the experience of nature and relaxation are included.
If situational and individual incentives fit together, motivation is the result. Motivation processes are an important prerequisite for achieving good sporting performance.
- Motives are to be equated with outlasting dispositions of evaluation, accordingly motives are motives to behave in a goal-oriented way in situations in a temporally outlasting, situationally outlasting and personality specific way.
- Motivations in sports are the current emotional (e.g.
friends, fear, hopes) and cognitive (e.g. expectations) processes, before, during and after doing sports.
Performance motivation is the “endeavor to increase or maintain the highest possible level of efficiency in all those activities in which a quality standard is considered binding and whose execution can therefore succeed or fail. “(Heckhausen) The athlete thus strives to fulfil a task in a certain sport in which one applies quality standards for oneself and thus to achieve or exceed the quality standard. The quality standard was set either individually or externally and consists of a performance that the athlete must achieve (e.g. a specified sprint time).
With the help of quality benchmarks, the athlete can individually assess the difficulty of a certain task and the skills needed to complete the task, and thus ultimately also the result of the action. The result of the action is judged individually, therefore the own claim decides whether an action is successful or not. The way in which people meet a challenge and performance situations is determined by their personality.
Here, a distinction is made between more “success motivated” and more “failure motivated” people. This can explain differences in behavior in the face of a performance challenge. Athletes who are confident of success, in contrast to those who are afraid of failure, seek out performance situations and face them with optimism.
Any risks are avoided by athletes who are afraid of failure and the pressure of a performance situation is resisted much less well, whereby this pressure has a negative effect on the outcome of the action. Motive types that are confident of success predominantly justify possible failures with a lack of ability. In contrast, athletes who are afraid of failure attribute poor performance primarily to unfavorable external circumstances.
-> Hope for success” or “fear of failure” are permanent personality traits and their respective characteristics determine the level of overall motivation.
- The performance motive, on the other hand, represents the triggering motive for doing sports and is based on the individual drives to achieve something. It is therefore one of many motives, but primarily stimulates sports activities.
If an athlete cannot achieve a performance goal despite all motivation, a state of frustration results.
Frustration is understood to be the “experience of disappointment due to a real or avoidable frustration of goals. “People decide on the one hand by the fact that they react differently sensitively to different frustrating situations and on the other hand by the degree of frustration tolerance (more or less appropriate processing of frustrating situations). Reactions to frustration can be quite constructive.
On the other hand, frustration often leads to evasive reactions in which the actual goal is not directly aimed at.
- Aggression
- Delayed aggression (aggression not towards z.B. the frustrating opponent, but towards the referee)
- Autoaggression (aggression towards your own “I”)
- Regression (not being able to retrieve the own performance)
- Apathy (inability to act)
- Resignation
- Displacement
- “going out of the field” (avoiding future frustrations)
- Rationalization (finding reasons why the goal was not achieved)
Aggressive behaviour is therefore always aimed at causing damage.
A distinction is made between explicit and instrumental aggression. In explicit aggression, damage is understood as a direct target of the aggressive action. In instrumental aggression, the aggressive behaviour of an athlete is used to achieve a sporting goal (aggressive defensive behaviour in soccer to intimidate the opponent).
Furthermore, aggression can be physical, verbal or symbolic (with the help of gestures). In order to answer the question – how does it come to aggression – three theories of aggression have been developed.
- Sporting activities are to be judged as aggressive if, in deviation from sporting norms and rules, someone explicitly intends to cause damage to other people with this action.
This damage can be both physical and mental.
- The frustration-aggression theory states that aggression is always a consequence of frustration, but frustration does not necessarily result in aggression, but also, for example, resignation or apathy.
- The drive and instinct theoretical concept attributes aggressive behavior to an innate aggression drive or instinct, whereby sport is a suitable valve for releasing aggression.
- The learning and socialization theoretical views on aggression understand aggressive behavior as a consequence of learning processes. Aggression behavior is learned over time, based on experience. If it is recognized that aggressive behavior often leads to success, the person will learn it.
