Effect of Motivation on the Performance of Tennis Players

Motivation is the driving force by which humans achieve their goals. Motivation is thought to be a combination of the drive within us to achieve our aims and the outside factors which affect it. With this in mind, motivation has the following two forms, intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Motivation is related to the intensity and direction of behaviour. That is, the level of arousal and the way in which we behave affect our motivation and hence performance. In this field of physical education and sports, no athlete can win or even show better performance without motivation. Hence, researcher felt necessary to attempt to investigate the effect of motivation on the performance of tennis players.

For the purpose of the study Twenty five tennis players, belonging to the age level of 15 to 21 years underwent four week training program at Tennis Court of Gwalior Young men Association, served as subject for this study. Performance in both initial and final test was taken in term of Dyer Backboard Tennis Test. The study was delimited to the following motivational methods- 1. Extrinsic rewards 2. Social reinforcement by the coaches 3. Competition 4. Goal setting. The data was collected by administering the tests. The test was administered in the tennis court. The necessary data was collected by the investigator by administering a pre-test on the performance of Dyer Backboard Tennis Test at the beginning of the study and final data was collected at the end of the four week training program in the same manner as the initial testing. The training for motivational methods was designed keeping in view the criterion of extrinsic reward, social reinforcement, competition and short term goal setting, along with the help from supervisor.

STATISTICAL PROCEDURE

In order to determine the effect of motivation on the performance of tennis, T-test was applied; the level of significance was kept at 0.5.

To determine the effectiveness of training programme, the pre-test and post-test scores for each experimental and control group were compared with each other by using t-ratio. The significance of difference between the pre-test and post-test means has been presented in table 1.

2

An analysis of table 1 showed that, the experimental group exhibited significant improvement on the performance of tennis players. Control group also improved performance on the same task significantly but it was less comparatively at 0.05 level of confidence. The significance of difference between the post-test of experimental and control group means has been presented in table 2

An analysis of table 2 showed that the post-test performance of the experimental group improved significantly than the control group at 0.05 level. Therefore, it may be determined that the subjects training with motivational methods (extrinsic rewards, significantly better performance as compared to the control group.

The analysis of data using t-ratio showed that there was significant difference in performance between initial and final test scores. Both the groups i.e. experimental and the control group improved their performance in Dyer Backboard Tennis Test. In the first place it is apparent that the final performance of the experimental group was found to have improved significantly which may be attributed to the fact that the application of the motivation (extrinsic reward, social reinforcement by the coach, goal setting and competition) in addition to the training, might have improved their performance. Secondly, the performance of the control group showed improvement in the final testing than that of their initial test. This may be due to the reason that a very systematic training programme was followed while training them, moreover the control group subject’s performance also improved significantly. Finally, the performance of experimental group was comparatively better in the final testing than the control group. This difference in the final test scores may be due to the fact that, the various motivation methods with which the experimental group was trained in addition to the general training have caused so, as all the motivational methods substantially contributed to the betterment in the performance. The result of the present study pertaining to the improvement in the performance in tennis was due to the application of the motivation.

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