Role of Mental Toughness in Achievement Goal Orientation of Collegiate Athletes

Abstract

Mental toughness is one of the most central psychological characteristics in achieving excellence in sports. Goal orientation refers to athletes’ orientation towards the task and the end result of the task. This paper aims at studying the role of mental toughness in goal orientation of collegiate athletes. A sample of 300 male and female sport students from various colleges located primarily in Coimbatore city were selected using table of random numbers. Task and ego orientation in sport questionnaire (TEOSQ) (Duda & Nicholls, 1992) and mental toughness questionnaire (Cherry, 2005) were used to collect data. The collected data were fed to SPSS for correlation analysis to know the relationship between mental toughness and achievement goal orientation. Regression analysis was done to study the influence of mental toughness on achievement goal orientation. Findings reveal that competitive desire and resilience are associated with task orientation, whereas self-confidence is associated with ego orientation. Further, competitive desire and self-confidence predicted task orientation and resilience predicted ego orientation.