Mastery goals tend to be associated with the satisfaction of mastering something—in other words, gaining control, proficiency, comprehensive knowledge, or sufficient skill in a given area such as mastering the art of cooking. In one review of research about learning goals, for example, students with primarily mastery orientations toward a course they were taking not only tended to express greater interest in the course, but also continued to express interest well beyond the official end of the course and to enroll in further courses in the same subject Harackiewicz, et al.
Performance goals, on the other hand, are extrinsically motivated arising from external factors and can have both positive and negative effects. Students with performance goals often tend to get higher grades than those who primarily express mastery goals, and this advantage is often seen both in the short term with individual assignments and in the long term with overall grade point average when graduating.
Another possible reason is that by focusing on gaining recognition as the top performer in a peer group, a performance orientation encourages competition with peers. Of particular interest is the role of cognitive dissonance on motivation. Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person experiences conflict, contradiction , or inconsistency in their cognitions.
If you do something you are ashamed of or act in a way that is counter to an idea you have about yourself for example, if you consider yourself an honest person but then lie to your parents when they ask about your future plans , you are likely to feel cognitive dissonance afterward.
The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance in their cognitions by either changing or justifying their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.
High-achievement motivation tends to lead to particular personality features. These include persistence, ability to delay gratification, and competitiveness:. Expectations can result in self-fulfilling prophecies. Some situational factors also affect achievement motivation. They include the expectation of success, incentives, control, and opportunity:. People with a high need for achievement tend to prefer moderately difficult tasks. Setting daily as well as larger goals will help you feel like you are accomplishing things at work, which in turn will improve your motivation.
Choose goals that are related to both your short- and long-term ambitions. Employees with a need for high achievement tend to thrive when they receive comprehensive feedback from their managers.
Feedback can help provide you with the level of challenge and learning you need to do well at work and feel accomplished. Work with your manager to set up a system to receive regular feedback. This could be an annual performance review, a weekly or bi-weekly meeting or all of the above.
At these meetings, ask your manager to assign you new or exciting work that challenges you. You could even share with your supervisor that you are motivated by achievement and would like to take on new challenges. This might impress your manager and contribute to an improved work environment for you at the same time. Read more: Using Performance Management in the Workplace.
If your day-to-day responsibilities at work are not sufficiently challenging or your supervisor is unable to assign you fulfilling work, seek out new projects that push you more.
Talk to your colleagues about what kinds of assignments might be available to you that are outside of your normal realm of experience. Before you begin a new project, make a list of all the skills you are excited about learning or the new experiences you will have working on the project. You can control how much you learn and feel accomplished by achieving more. Giving yourself a plan for the day, week and month can help motivate you to achieve your interim goals.
Start each day at work by asking yourself what you need to accomplish that day to be successful. Create a journal or planner to write down your goals or use organizing software to keep track of them. Mastery-avoidance goals represent striving to avoid absolute or intrapersonal incompetence, for example, striving not to do worse than one has done previously.
Performance-approach goals represent striving to approach interpersonal competence, for example, striving to do better than others. Performance-avoidance goals represent striving to avoid interpersonal incompetence, for example, striving to avoid doing worse than others.
These achievement goals are posited to have an important and direct impact on the way people engage in achievement activities and, accordingly, the outcomes they incur. Broadly stated, mastery-approach and performance-approach goals are predicted to lead to adaptive behavior and different types of positive outcomes e.
Mastery-avoidance and, especially, performance-avoidance goals, on the other hand, are predicted to lead to maladaptive behavior and negative outcomes such as selecting easy instead of optimally challenging tasks, quitting when difficulty or failure is encountered, and performing poorly. A substantial amount of research over the past decade has supported these predictions. Other variables are needed to explain why people orient toward different definitions and valences of competence in the first place, and why they adopt particular types of achievement goals.
These variables are not posited to have a direct influence on achievement outcomes, but they are expected to have an indirect influence by prompting achievement goals that, in turn, exert a direct influence on achievement outcomes.
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