The Effect of Personality and Motivation on Sports Performance

Motivation in sports is why people do what they do. It is also the direction and intensity of one’s effort and determination to achieve. The more motivated one is, the more likely one is to succeed.

The personality theory that I have chosen to focus on will be Identity Theory. It was developed by Erik Erikson in the nineteen hundreds. Erik Erikson believed that every individual goes through a certain number of stages to reach his or her full development or potential (Erikson, 1994). He theorized that a human being goes through eight different stages ranging from birth to death (Erikson, 1994). Identity Theory focuses on eight psychosocial stages of development, and an epigenetic principle of maturation (Schultz, 2008). The stages of development are

In psychology, there are four major theories of personality: psychodynamic, trait or five-factor model, humanistic, and social-cognitive. The psychodynamic theory primarily focuses on the role of the unconscious mind. The social cognitive theory focuses on the effect of the environment on behavior and is based on theories of learning. Whereas, the humanistic theory emphasizes conscious life experiences and choices. The trait or five-factor model focuses on characteristics themselves and not the roots of personality.

Motivation is defined as the process that initiates, guides, and maintains goal-oriented behaviors. For an athlete, motivation can be the difference between waking up at 5:00 a.m. to go for a mile run versus sleeping in. It could be the difference between putting in an extra set of reps in the weight room versus going to the mall with friends. It could be putting in extra time at practice versus going on a date. Motivation is necessary to augment ability. It’s extremely important because one will face tests from fatigue, pain, boredom and outside desires that will challenge the athlete’s focus on becoming the best they can be. Motivation is the center of success, it can be thought of as a tree with the other factors being branches that stem from motivation. It will effect the mental aspects of game preparation, the physical aspects of nutrition, conditioning and sleep. Finally, it will affect the coaching side in terms of training. Some athletes can get through high school and college off size and athleticism.

Personality is looked at everyday purposely and accidently. Whether you are judging how your new professor for the semester will be, or if you are studying your best friend for a project, personality is studied abundantly. While there are many ways to define personality, there is not a worldwide definition around. Personality is the unique combination of patterns that influence behavior, thought, motivation, and emotion in a human being (boundless.com). That is one of many ways of defining personality. When examining personality, there are four main approachable theories including: The Psychodynamic Approach, The Trait Approach, The Social-Cognitive Approach, and The Humanistic Approach.

After consulting, the coach found out his reasoning being, when he played as a child, they did not have all the gear to entirely be safe and this worried the dad that the same thing would happen to his son. But because football has changed and teaches kids to stay in shape and learn life skills such as sportsmanship, hard-work, discipline, and teamwork, parents should take the risk and let their kids play the game.

Rugby Analysis Coursework Position: Lock, Second Row Student Accessed: Ruan Kennard Candidate Number: 7101 Centre Number: 90306 Essential Skills: Handling When you are the ball carrier on the field, you need to keep your possession as well keeping the ball with you. Handling the ball is hard because of moving it around with your body to the number of scenarios that occur next to you. As the player you need to be able to handle the ball in any type of situation at any time, this requires a lot of focus and active thinking.

One final theory relating to personality is the interactionist theory; this theory states that personality has three levels that interact to form an individual’s personality and is based on the work of Hollander (1967).

There is a suggestion that if the athlete is in an environment where there is an emphasis on how to positively perform within a team and how the athletes have cooperated and worked together in the past and have achieved success, then the athlete is positively motivated. However if the athlete is in an environment where only outcome and past failures are focused upon and individual mistakes are emphasized then the impact on motivation is negative, as the focus for the athlete is fear of past mistakes which leads to less effort and is then attributed to lack of

This research was designed to investigate whether or not the personality traits and learning styles of the individual players on an athletic team aggregate into both a team personality and a team learning style, and whether or not having an understanding of that unique mix would help inform the decision of a coach with respect to coaching and teaching style choices, both of which combine into the leadership style of that coach. Consider that, for example, a visual learner will most benefit from a speech about a game plan if a PowerPoint or an explanatory document accompanies the speech, something more than simply hearing it. But, a kinesthetic learner needs

The current study was conducted to show that college athletes would have higher motivation, thus doing better in school compared to students who were not athletes. We theorized that athletes would have had higher levels of motivation, due to being part of a sports team creating more responsibilities than non-athletes. The data we collected shows that athletes do in fact have higher external motivating variables than non-athletes, which could vary from; their teammates motivating them or from their coaches. However non-athletes showed to have higher internal motivating variables, which could be described as students wanting to get a good career, or to wanting to graduate to make their families proud. We hypothesized that athletes would have

Motivation can influence decisions, learning and performance in sport. If a performer is not in a positive psychological state, mistakes will be made in the performance, and they will not perform at their best level.

Personality theories are theories that explain how various characteristics of a person such as intelligence, temperament, habits, skills, attitudes and traits define our uniqueness as human beings. Each person has his or her personality as characterized by the mentioned traits, and this explain the diversity in character in human beings. When treating mental illness, for example Anorexia Nervosa as a specialized counselor, it is important to consider a

In this report, I am going to talk about the effects of personality and motivation on sports performance and I will do this by looking at the different theories relating to sports performance and how sports athletes deal with the effects of personality and motivation in sports performances.

There are a number of theories and approaches that have been suggested to try to explain personality and how it can influence sports performance. The main theories you will look at are: