The dual nature of perfectionism in sports: relationships with emotion, motivation, and performance

Abstract

Perfectionism is a prevalent characteristic in athletes. Yet some researchers have argued that perfectionism in sports is maladaptive because it undermines athletes’ performance and stifles athletic development. This argument, however, neglects that perfectionism is a multidimensional characteristic and that only some dimensions of perfectionism are clearly maladaptive, whereas others are not. This review argues that perfectionism is comprised of two main dimensions – perfectionistic strivings and perfectionistic concerns (Stoeber & Otto, 2006) – that show different and unique patterns of relationships with athletes’ emotions, motivation, and performance. In support of this argument the review will present findings indicating that only perfectionistic concerns show unique positive relationships with competitive anxiety, fear of failure, and avoidance goal orientations. In contrast, perfectionistic strivings show unique positive relationships with self-confidence, hope of success, approach goal orientations, and performance in training and competitions. The findings suggest that only perfectionistic concerns are clearly maladaptive, whereas perfectionistic strivings may form part of a healthy striving for excellence. Implications for applied sport psychology are discussed as are open questions for future research.

Keywords:

• perfectionism
• sports
• emotion
• motivation
• performance

Notes

1. Gaudreau and Thompson (2010) recently proposed an alternative, 2×2 model of perfectionism. This model suggests to refer only to people who are low in perfectionistic strivings and low in perfectionistic concerns as ‘nonperfectionists’, and refer to people low in perfectionistic strivings but high in perfectionistic concerns as ‘pure evaluative concerns perfectionists’. Whereas Gaudreau and Thompson provided some initial evidence for their model (see, however, Douilliez & Lefèvre, 2011), I personally consider the strivings component of perfectionism an integral element of the definition of perfectionism (see also Shafran, Cooper, & Fairburn, 2002) and I am therefore unconvinced that people who only show the concerns component of perfectionism but not the strivings component should be referred to as ‘perfectionists’ (see also Rice & Ashby, 2007).

2. There are some caveats when using the FMPS and MPS to measure perfectionistic strivings. First, the FMPS personal standards scale contains items that measure conditional self-worth. Consequently, it is preferable to use only the items measuring ‘pure personal standards’ (see DiBartolo, Frost, Chang, LaSota, & Grills, 2004). Second, the MPS self-oriented perfectionism scale captures two different aspects of self-oriented perfectionism: perfectionistic striving and importance of being perfect (Campbell & Di Paula, 2002). Consequently, it is preferable to use only the perfectionistic striving items if one aims to capture perfectionistic strivings (see Stoeber & Childs, 2010; for a sports example, see Hill, Hall, & Appleton, 2010).