Sports situations in which players have an opportunity to display physical prowess (i.e., in training or matches) activate their task or ego centered goals. They might be either highly task involved or ego involved in that situation, or they might even switch between the two, because their perception of what they need to feel could change from second to second.
For example, imagine yourself as a young football player in a grudge match. You’ve felt great during the match because you’ve worked hard, made some great tackles and accurate passes, and your work on your concentration skills has paid off by allowing you to refocus quickly. You’ve spent most of the game in a highly task-involved state of mind and have received praise from your teammates.
The game is tied and goes to a penalty shoot out. You are the last player of five selected, and the score is 2-2. As you make that long walk to the penalty spot, how does the situation and its potential consequences affect your view of success and skill? Will your feelings of competence depend entirely on scoring or missing? And, if you do become ego involved, how might it affect your chances of getting that winning goal?
All athletes have an innate preference for task or ego involved goals in sport. These predispositions, referred to as task and ego goal orientations, are believed to develop throughout childhood largely due to the types of people the athletes come in contact with and the situations they are placed in.
If children consistently receive parental praise that’s contingent on their effort and recognition for personal improvement from their coaches, and are encouraged to learn from their errors, then they are likely to engender a task orientation. It becomes second nature for them to believe that success is associated with mastery, effort, understanding, and personal responsibility.
The behavior of their role models in sport also affects this development. Such an environment is far different from one where children are shaped by rewards for winning (alone), praise for the best school grades, criticism or non-selection despite making their best effort, or coaches whose style is to hand out unequal recognition. This kind of environment helps an ego orientation to flourish, along with the belief that ability and talent, not effort and personal endeavor, earn rewards.
Goal orientations are believed to be relatively stable and enduring characteristics that are largely formed by mid to late adolescence. Hence, coaches and parents should attempt to shape a child’s development as early as possible during the 6- to 14-year-old phase.
In this developmental period, children’s cognitive abilities start working overtime as they begin to understand that effort isn’t the sole reason for success at a skill. At about 11 or 12 years of age, they begin to realise that regardless of effort, some children simply have more skills than others. That’s when the fantasy of being the next super-star comes under obvious pressure for some children.
The strength of a goal orientation influences whether a player will adopt a task or ego involved goal in a specific sport situation. It is also perfectly reasonable for growing athletes to develop both high task and ego orientations if they have been exposed to an assortment of task and ego oriented situations and people. However, never underestimate the power of a particular moment.
The adolescent athlete might be quite high in task orientation, but in a competition with a high degree of public evaluation, judgment, criticism, or comparison based on who’s best, with rewards and benefits for winners and negative consequences for losers, he or she might become ego involved. Competitions accompanied by high perceived expectations and consequences arguably form the natural basis of professional sport.
Factors such as the stage of the event (e.g., final or qualifying match), whether selection is at stake, previous head-to-heads, financial rewards, age of the opponent (e.g., playing a talented younger player), representing the team or country for the first time, and the support of the audience can make a match a natural ego-involving laboratory.
Nevertheless, not all sport is like that; in fact, some sport situations offset the natural importance of superiority by emphasising participation and publicly reinforcing or rewarding personal effort, improvement, and problem solving rather than focusing on comparisons.
An example is a swimming club that encourages all standards of swimmer, with a coach who gives recognition solely based on individual improvements in time or technique. These situations increase the importance and number of task-involving cues. The key message here is that the availability of task-involving cues in sports that are naturally ego involving allows the athlete to develop a more task-involved approach to competition.
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