Relationships between Cooperation and Goal Orientation among Male Professional and Semi-Professional Team Athletes

Abstract

In team sports, athletes' goals may focus on the task (enhancing performance, developing better skills, etc.) or on ego (being better than the others, achieving superiority, etc.). This study investigated the relationships between athletes' goal orientation and their tendency to cooperate with teammates and coaches. 158 professional men (M age = 24.1 yr., SD = 4.6) who played on various sport teams participated in this study. Goal orientation was measured with the Portuguese version of the Task and Ego Orientation in Sport Questionnaire, and cooperation was measured with the Questionário de Cooperação Desportiva. Cooperation was positively correlated with task orientation, and negatively correlated with ego orientation. Overall, the findings support that in sports, directing the players' focus on task may promote prosocial behavior.

Motivation Measures in Sport: A Critical Review and Bibliometric Analysis

“…In contract, ego orientation positively predicts views about the extrinsic benefits and personal gains afforded by sport (Duda, 1989), and is positively associated with stronger pro-doping attitudes (Allen et al, 2015). The association between task orientation and cooperation/prosocial behavior was also reported by Lameiras et al (2014). There are direct and positive links between task orientation, perceived competence, intrinsic motivation/interest and effort (Williams and Gill, 1995).…”

“…Subscale scores (mean followed by standard deviation in parentheses) for the TEOSQ are provided in Table 8, and readers are directed to Duda and Whitehead (1998) for a table of subscale scores for papers between 1989 and 1997. The TEOSQ has been successfully used for both youth (e.g., Williams and Gill, 1995) and adult (e.g., Lameiras et al, 2014) samples.…”

“…For the task and ego subscales, respectively, Cronbach's alpha is 0.82 and 0.89 among high school basketball players (Duda, 1989), 0.84 and 0.86 for American middle school students (Williams and Gill, 1995), 0.88 and 0.82 for elite soccer players (Van-Yperen and Duda, 1999), 0.76 and 0.84 for British university athletes (Ntoumanis, 2001), 0.83 and 0.82 for Portuguese professional athletes (Lameiras et al, 2014), and 0.84 and 0.81 for Scottish athletes (Allen et al, 2015). Test-retest reliability of the subscale scores was reported as 0.58 (task) and 0.67 (ego) across one soccer season, which is insufficient (Van-Yperen and Duda, 1999).…”

Ranking Features on Psychological Dynamics of Cooperative Team Work through Bayesian Networks

“…These two variables appear as the BN antecessors, influencing the rest of the variables. Furthermore, in our study, the main node has been found to be the cooperative teamwork style (as has been outlined in previous studies [13,20,52]); it determines the BN bottom consequences, the members roles and their experience, i.e., their time duration for playing on the same team. These two consequences are critical for the determination of the team performance and their stability across different situations.…”

“…Some psychological factors of collaborative teams have been studied more than others in terms of performance, such as cohesion [9,10] or group facilitators and blockers' roles [11]. Features, such as the specificity of the jobs [12] (or playing positions, in this case), generating performance expectations, the motivational climate generated by the manager [13] and the leadership styles of the coach, which are not usually studied, are considered here in this paper.…”