Chapter 4: Meaning-Making and Motivation: A Dynamic Model
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Published:2009
Avi Kaplan, Hanoch Flum, Keren Kemelman, 2009. "Meaning-Making and Motivation: A Dynamic Model", Culture, Self, and, Motivation: Essays in Honor of Martin L. Maehr, Avi Kaplan, Stuart A. Karabenick, Elisabeth De Groot
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One of the main contributions of Martin Maehr to the field of achievement motivation has been the emphasis on the role of meaning in people’s action. Up until the 1970s, the dominant psychological concept in achievement motivation theory and research was the Achievement Needs—the affective personality attributes that are supposedly established early in life, and which predispose individuals to respond positively or aversively to achievement cues in the environment (McClelland, 1961). Maehr (1974) was one of the early and main proponents of alternative perspectives that emphasize the situational nature of motivation. He argued that variability in people’s investment of time, talent, and energy can be explained not only, or even primarily, by stable personality differences in affective motivational resources, but by the situated socio-cognitive meaning that people construct for the achievement situation. While this meaning involves personal dispositions, it also integrates the characteristics of the particular context and situation:
Meaning is the critical determinant of motivation. Whether or not persons will invest themselves in a particular activity depends on what the activity means to them. Persons, it may be assumed, characteristically bring a certain package of meanings with them into a situation, which determines their behavior in the particular situation at hand. There are also features of any given situation that affect the meanings that may arise there for the person. It is these meanings that determine personal investment (Maehr, 1984, p. 123).
