Toward a Model of Strategic Goal Setting in Sports

Motivation and goal setting are two important elements in sport performance. Individual athletes as well as members of sport teams put a lot of effort in improving their performance. Two general goals are involved in such a process: first, improving absolute performance where an athlete in the long jump trains on her own to steadily become better. Second, in a situation of relative performance, usually in competitions, if there are several stages where say many runners compete to get to the final event, in each heat it suffices for the top runners to finish ahead of their competitors regardless of time. If an athlete competes in the high jump he can ask to set the bar much higher than what it was in a particular time. If he is successful in passing the high bar, his competitors are unlikely to beat him. However, such a decision entails risk as the athlete himself may not be able to pass the bar that he himself set. In competitive sports athletes have to take risks taking in different situations.

In this talk I will present a model that has been developed in my studies of managerial risk taking. The model assumes that athletes in competitions have two generic goals. One is a performance aspiration, the other is survival, which in sport competitions means not to lose the game. Since competitions involve several steps, an athlete may succeed in some and fail in others. The main question is how much risk an athlete will take after a failed attempt (like in the high jump) or after a successful attempt, like being in the lead in the middle of a long jump competition. I will describe the model using data collected in other context such as in the Jeopardy! television game and will discuss potential implications for risky competition and strategic goal setting in sports.