Grit Happens: Moderating Effects on Motivational Feedback and Sport Performance

Abstract

Research on motivational climates within athletics has focused on mastery and ego achievement approaches, yielding different psychological consequences (Smith, Smoll, & Cumming, 2007). Further, the motivational climate may interact with athletes' trait characteristics, such as grit, resulting in different outcomes. Grit may alter athletes' experience of the motivational climate by helping them remain oriented to their long-term quest in sport (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007). However, to date, the impact of these motivational climates and potential moderating factors on athlete performance remains in question, as the research utilizing objective measures of athletic performance is limited (Harwood, Keegan, Smith, & Raine, 2015). We used a motivational research paradigm (e.g., Mueller & Dweck, 1998) to examine the effects of mastery- or ego-involving feedback on 71 high school adolescent soccer players' (M_age = 15.81) performance on a kicking task. Then we explored the potential moderating effects of grit on the relationship between motivational feedback and the athletes' performance, desire to persist, and choice of task difficulty on a soccer task. Athletes performed significantly better receiving mastery- as opposed to ego-involving feedback. Further, grit was a significant moderator of the feedback-shooting performance relationship, accounting for 3.9% of variance. Simple slopes analysis revealed a significant effect for low (B = 13.32, SE_b = 4.44, p =.004, t = 2.99), but not high (B = 2.11, SE_b = 4.31, p =.63, t = 0.49), grit on task performance. These results suggest that the feedback athletes receive matters, especially for those low in grit.

Notes

1 Although we removed the 10 athletes who failed the manipulation check and present the results based on the sample of 71 athletes, we also ran all statistical analyses with the original 81 athletes based on the feedback condition to which they had been assigned. Levels of statistical significance were unchanged across the two samples.