Influence of The Mastery Climate and The Competitive Climate on Sports Performance

In the following essay, I will be talking about how coaches, teachers and instructors can create two different climates, the mastery climate and the competitive climate and how this can impact sports performance. A mastery climate involves having a motivational climate and has a great emphasis on team work and support, it also has an increase in intrinsic motivation and it decreases the level of anxiety, which are all advantages as it helps to motivate certain people. For example, coaches, teachers and instructors would use this type of climate when doing sport with younger years because they need to be able to motivate them, so giving them the praise for doing something well will help that and they aren’t as competitive as the older years so there is no need to have the competitive climate. A disadvantage of the mastery climate is that it doesn’t encourage elitism which means that it doesn’t give the elite athletes the extra push that they need to become even better. For example, a very good golf player would not want to hear encouragement on something they did wrong, they want to know what it was so they can improve and continue to get better.

A competitive climate is focused on the outcome, competition is strongly encouraged and where the highest ability will receive attention. It also creates an environment where athletes believe poor performance and mistakes will be punished. For example, a very good tennis player would need to hear what they need to improve on to improve their game. The competitive climate is known to lead to less effort as failure seems to be a lack of ability which is a big disadvantage because it can demotivate the athletes as they think they are not good enough. For example, if a coach was to use the competitive climate on the younger years, it would demotivate them because they aren’t getting any encouragement and motivation when something goes wrong, they are getting told to do this and that.

In conclusion, all these principles can impact sports performance. In mastery climate, it is a motivational climate meaning that the athletes will feel motivated to succeed, meaning that their sports performance will improve. In competitive climate, it is strongly focused on competition which can impact sports performance as athletes will need to be at their best all the time, which can impact sports performance as they will not be able to perform at these levels all the time. It is important that at points both of these climates are used but in a motivational manner that will increase performance and motivational levels and not decrease performance.