Dual pathways to high performance: Team achievement goals, cooperation, and competition in elite sports teams

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High performance is a key priority for elite sports teams. With this study, we investigate the performance of interdependent elite youth sports teams in relation to team achievement goals and within-team cooperation and competition, generically defined as teams’ shared perception of the extent to which team members engage in cooperative or competitive behaviors. Integrating achievement goal theory and social interdependence theory, we propose that team mastery goals (teams’ collective pursuit of learning and development) relate to within-team cooperation and that team performance goals (teams’ shared focus on winning and demonstrating competence) relate to within-team competition. Next, we propose that within-team cooperation facilitates team performance and explore the link between within-team competition and team performance. After the winter break, 289 players from 42 elite field hockey teams completed online survey questions about team achievement goals, cooperation, and competition. Team performance was represented by teams’ end-of-season point totals. Multilevel path modeling suggests dual pathways to team performance: (1) The more teams fostered team mastery goals, the more cooperative team members’ interactions were and the better the teams performed, and (2) the more teams fostered team performance goals, the more competitive the interactions among team members were and the better the teams performed. We tentatively interpret this dual pattern from the perspective of high-level interdependent youth sports teams as “coopetitive” environments, where teams traditionally focus on learning and development and where baseline levels of cooperation are high, creating conditions in which cooperation and some degree of competition can coincide and jointly contribute to team performance.