News Finding: "Athletes with autonomous motives put in more effort and persisted for longer which helped them reach higher levels of performance with increasingly difficult but attainable goals.
Paper Finding: Practitioners who aim to facilitate effective goal setting in sport, business, and educational settings would benefit from guidelines for developing autonomous motivation.
News Context: "We found autonomous motives such as enjoyment or personal importance were a double-edged sword," explained Professor Sedikides, a social and personality psychologist from the University of Southampton. "Athletes with autonomous motives put in more effort and persisted for longer which helped them reach higher levels of performance with increasingly difficult but attainable goals. Yet when the goal became unachievable, they had great difficulty realising this, which led to brooding over the failure as the athletes struggled to disengage from the goal."
Paper Context: Such motivation can be beneficial, behaviorally and affectively, especially when goals become increasingly difficult over time. Practitioners who aim to facilitate effective goal setting in sport, business, and educational settings would benefit from guidelines for developing autonomous motivation. To conclude, the present research supports and extends previous findings regarding the role of autonomous motivation for adaptive goal striving.