Confronting task difficulty in ego involvement: Change in performance goals.

Abstract

Both Dweck (1986) and Nicholls (1984) proposed that when ego-involved individuals encounter difficulty, they would begin to doubt their level of ability, and as a consequence, their commitment to the goal of demonstrating high ability would decline. As difficulty continued, perceived ability would decline, and eventually the goal would be abandoned. In the present study, the authors tested these predictions utilizing a longitudinal experimental design to assess changes across time in students' perceived ability, achievement goals, performance, and affective reactions as they experienced differing levels of task difficulty in an ego-involving context. College students (N = 156) participated in 3 sessions, each 1 week apart, in which they were given ego-involving instructions and worked on "intelligence test" items. While the average level of difficulty of the session increased progressively in the experimental condition, it remained similar across sessions for the control condition. Results were generally supportive of the original predictions. As the difficulty of the items increased across sessions, students' perceived ability declined and so did their commitment to performance-approach goals, while their endorsement of work-avoidance goals increased. Also consistent with predictions, students experiencing increasing difficulty expressed stronger escapist thoughts, more negative affect, and less positive affect.

The socialization of performance goals

“…At level 2, group-supervisors promote the endorsement of performance-based goals socialization, whereas at level 1, subordinates' perceived self-competence is a predictor of the approach vs. avoidance component associated with these performance-based goals. Considering both supervisors' and subordinates' goals, our results extend the work on performance goals adjustment over time (e.g., Kumar & Jagacinski, 2011;Meece, & Miller, 2001, Senko & Harackiewicz, 2005, determine the extent to which performance goals socialization is a manifest or a latent phenomenon (Bender, 1967). These questions notwithstanding, our findings highlight the need to take a structural perspective in understanding the effects of performance goals, that is, studying the (goals) dynamics as a function of social norms (Doise, 1986;Poortvliet & Darnon, 2010).…”

Autonomous and controlled reasons underlying achievement goals: Implications for the 3 × 2 achievement goal model in educational and work settings

“…However, in light of the minimal empirical evidences to date for omnibus mastery-avoidance goals (see Baranik et al 2010), hypotheses with respect to task-avoidance and selfavoidance should be deemed as exploratory. In addition, we hypothesized that other-avoidance goals would be unrelated or weakly related to satisfaction (e.g., Verner-Filion and Gaudreau 2010), engagement (e.g., Church et al 2001;Luo et al 2011), and positive affect (e.g., Kumar and Jagacinski 2011;Mouratidis et al 2013). We also expected that otheravoidance goals would be significantly and positively related to anxiety (e.g., Elliot et al 2011).…”

“…Moreover, in a meta-analysis by Baranik et al (2010), mastery-avoidance goals were found to positively correlate with interest and negative affect and negatively so with performance. Performance-avoidance goals have been almost uniformly correlated to negative outcomes such as burnout and negative affect (e.g., Kumar and Jagacinski 2011;Tuominen-Soini et al 2008 of performance-approach goals in prior research. Indeed, performance-approach goals were significantly and positively associated with positive affect and satisfaction in some studies (e.g., Mouratidis et al 2013;Papaioannou et al 2008), whereas other research did not find any significant relationship with these outcomes (e.g., Adie et al 2008;Poortvliet and Giebels 2012).…”

Personal and contextual antecedents of achievement goals: Their direct and indirect relations to students' learning strategies

“…Additionally, our study showed, similar to that reported by KenneyBenson, Pomerantz, Ryan, and Patrick (2006) that females reported higher level of effective learning strategies and that compared to fifth-grade students, their sixth-grade counterparts showed less preference for performance goals. Assuming that older students deal with more difficult school-related activities, it makes sense to hypothesize that older students are less likely to endorse performance goals as recent research has shown that increases in task difficulty coincide with decreases in the endorsement of performance goals (Kumar & Jagacinski, 2011 Fig. 2.…”