Personality and Motivation in Sport

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Task One

Personality

Personality is a mixture of a person's traits and characteristics which make them different from everyone else.

Sports performers personalities' may widely vary or be very similar. When describing their personality, just listing characteristics is not always 100% accurate. This is because their characteristics may be different when not playing sports. For example, Eric Cantona may only be aggressive when on the football pitch and not in his everyday life.

Because of this, Hollander then designed a structure of personality which was split into 3 layers:

1. Psychological core - true beliefs and values

2. Typical responses - normal response to a situation.

3. Role-related behaviour - response is affected by the social environment the person is in.

These can also be shown on a diagram like this:

Social Environment

Structure of personality example - Theo Walcott.

CHARACTERISTICS

PSYCHOLOGICAL CORE

TYPICAL RESPONSES

ROLE-RELATED BEHAVIOUR

Humble

Quiet

Motivated

Committed

Focussed

Competitive

Driven

Fearless

Another way in which sports psychologists differentiate between sports personalities is with the trait approach. Two psychologists, Cattell and Eyesnck,