Assessment of the impact of structural organization of achievement motivation of athletes upon their performance

Abstract

The subject of this research is the psychological patterns of dynamic manifestations of athlete’s motivation for achieving results in individual sports, as well as peculiarities of its transformation, taking into account professional becoming and the impact on self-efficacy The object of this research is the achievement motivation of athletes in individual sports. The author aims to empirically assess the impact of structural organization of achievement motivation of athletes upon their performance and achievements. Relying on the methods of nomothetic analysis of the data on the achievement motivation of over than 500 athletes, as well as their achievements, the article builds the system of independent equations that allow analyzing the impact of basic motivational factors (ego orientation, task solution, and material values) upon the effectiveness of athletes of the corresponding professional age group. The main conclusion consists in the revealed patterns that determine the effectiveness of an athlete depending on the structural organization of achievement motivation. Leaning on the developed system of independent equations, the author determines the level of sensitivity of achievements to the structure of the motive of athletes in individual sports. It is established that the degree of performance of an athlete is most sensitive to changes in the "task-solution orientation" factor. However, the progress in professional development leads to inclination towards the "material factor". The novelty of consists in modernization of the existing approaches and algorithms towards studying the achievement motivation (approaches of R. A. Piloyan, E. P. Ilyin, A. C. Puni, etc.) within the framework of using the dynamic analysis of the three-dimensional structure of motivation ("ego", "tasks", "material factors") applicable to athletes in individual sports. This allowed substantiating the need to use such mathematical-statistical models that are able to forecast the performance of an athlete depending on the structural organization of basic motives in each professional group.