The relationship between teachers' work motivation and classroom goal orientation

We investigated the relationship between teachers’ work motivation and their self-reported endorsement of mastery goals - i.e. goals focusing on learning and effort-, instead of performance goals - i.e. goals focusing on competition-, in the classroom. 154 secondary school teachers in the Netherlands completed a questionnaire on background characteristics, work motivation, and classroom goal structures. We found that teachers with higher levels of autonomous motivation, scored high on their self-reported endorsement of mastery goals. Controlled motivation was a significant predictor of performance goals, but not of mastery goals. In contrast, autonomous motivation was found to be a small ye…