Competition and Goal Pursuit: A Temporally Dynamic Perspective

Competition is prevalent in goal pursuit. These goals may explicitly include outperforming others in a competition, or they can be implicit, such that people internally compare and compete with peers during the pursuit of their own individual goals. In this chapter, we examine competitions from the perspective of goal pursuit theories and answer the critical question of when each driver of motivation should exert the most impact in explicit and implicit competitions. We present a temporally dynamic goal pursuit model that explains how people’s motivation and effort exertion evolve over the course of explicit competition, as well as how, and when, people may implicitly compete and even sabotage others who are pursuing an individual goal alongside them.