Growth Mindset in Sports
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Athleticism can be defined as the quality of possessing the type of energy and strength possessed by great athletes. Such qualities include power, mobility, strength, mental resilience, speed, anaerobic and aerobic capacity, stability, agility, balance, and coordination (Orvidas et al., 2018). Athletic skills can be genetically acquired or learned through general physical preparedness for essential fitness, specific physical readiness in a specific sport or activity of interest, and sport-specific preparedness where one perfects their technique in a particular sport they play. Individuals hold various beliefs about athleticism. Some believe that athleticism is fixed, meaning that it is not flexible and remains unchanged with practice, while others have a growth mindset that postulates that it is possible to improve athleticism through learning, training, and effort. This paper will determine if strong beliefs about athleticism remain unaffected by change like in other domains.
Individuals with a growth adoption mindset work harder when faced with challenges and try new techniques to enhance their performance. On the other hand, individuals with fixed adoption attitudes are concerned with appearing competent and therefore exert less effort, have poor strategies for improvement, and have higher levels of negative emotions. A 2011 study sought to examine whether a student’s ability to lose or maintain intrinsic motivation in academics could be predicted by their views about intelligence (Haimovitz et al., 2011). Research in the academic sector indicates that persistence, engagement in conceptual education, and cognitive flexibility are associated with intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is also a predictor for good performance in academics, especially for students with lower abilities. This study was conducted as a result of concern over the tendency of intrinsic motivation to dissipate with progression through school years despite its immense benefits.
The study was conducted over the 2005-2006 academic year, with nine hundred and seventy-eight participants from eight different schools in Portland. The students were all in grades three through eight, drawn from three parochial and five public schools. The students were given surveys to assess their opinions on the pliability of intelligence, levels of inherent motivation, and ability-validation goals in the fall and spring (Haimovitz et al., 2011). The study established that the two major factors that influence intrinsic motivation are beliefs about the pliability of intelligence, implying a growth adoption mindset, and a student’s inclination to pursue validation through coursework, indicating a fixed adoption attitude. Students who experienced declines in motivation adopted a fixed attitude, suggesting that in the intellectual achievement domain, intrinsic motivation changes with changing perceptions on intelligence.
In 2019, Canning and colleagues conducted three studies to evaluate how organizational mindset can be used as a fundamental belief to predict workplace culture and commitment and trust among employees. In the first study, the association between corporate workplace culture and employee accounts of workplace culture was examined in Fortune 500 companies by coding their mission statements and pairing them with data from Glassdoor culture (Canning, 2019). In the second study, 207 adults were subjected to random assignments of reading either fixed-oriented or growth-oriented mission statements from Fortune 500 companies. Here, the organizational mindset was manipulated to determine its causative effect on employee perception of cultural standards. In the third study, more than 500 workers were selected from 7 Fortune 1000 organizations to measure the robustness and external validity of the outcomes of the second study. The three studies, taken together, provided convergent proof of the effect of organizational mindset through different assessments.
From the first study, it was found that Fortune 500 companies with a more fixed attitude than growth mindset in their mission statements perpetuated employee dissatisfaction with their workplace culture from Glassdoor data. The findings indicate that the mindset of an organization can influence the perceptions of employees about the workplace culture. The second study revealed that the expectations of lay people about particular norms that characterize organizational culture are influenced by the mission statement’s expression of a company’s mindset (Canning, 2019). The standards, subsequently, predicted the forecasts made by people about employee commitment and trust within the organization. The third study established that companies with fixed mindsets were found to have a less ethical, innovative, and collaborative culture by employees. All the studies show that companies with fixed mindsets promote negative perceptions about the company culture and adversely affect commitment and trust by employees, in contrast with companies with growth-oriented mission statements. Therefore, in the organizational domain, core organizational beliefs change with corporate mindsets.
In the present study, one hundred and six individuals were given questionnaires to assess whether an individual’s confidence of beliefs could predict their inclination towards changing from a fixed to a growth mindset after the reception of a growth intervention. The study aimed to determine whether it is possible to change a fixed mindset to a growth mindset through an effective albeit simple intervention and to establish whether attitude in the sports domain is consistent.
Seventy-two of the participants were male, while thirty-four were female, with seventy-six of them aging between 18 and 22 years. The participants were required to voice their opinion on whether athleticism required more talent than hard work on a scale of 1-7. Afterward, a growth intervention was given to them. The intervention involved reading a paragraph about the malleability of human brains, how the networks among neurons grow with practice, how muscle memories are increased through hard work, and how excelling in sports is not dependent on natural talents. The participants were also asked to help middle school students understand the article’s message by explaining it in 50 words, after which they were given the questionnaire again.
The study found that there was no change in individuals with initial high confidence in belief rates after the intervention due to high confidence levels. However, individuals with low confidence levels were more likely to change their beliefs after the growth intervention to either weak growth or high growth mindsets. The implication is that in contrast with other domains, attitudes remain consistent in the sports domain. However, the study had no control group, raising questions about its validity as it did not compare different mindsets. To this end, future assessments on beliefs about athleticism ought to include a control group for fixed interventions.
References
Canning, E. A., Murphy, M. C., Emerson, K. T., Chatman, J. A., Dweck, C. S., & Kray, L. J. (2019). Cultures of genius at work: Organizational mindsets predict cultural norms, trust, and commitment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46(4), 626- 642. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167219872473
Haimovitz, K., Wormington, S. V., & Corpus, J. H. (2011). Dangerous mindsets: How beliefs about intelligence predict motivational change. Learning and Individual Differences, 21(6), 747-752. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2011.09.002
Orvidas, K., Burnette, J., & Russell, V. (2018). Mindsets applied to fitness: Growth beliefs predict exercise efficacy, value, and frequency. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 36, 156-161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2018.02.006