The Effect of Ego-Orientation on MILITARY Cadets’ Intention for Sport Activity and Performance

The purpose of this study to identify the effect of achievement orientation on the military cadets’ intention for adherence to sport activities(IASA) and performance in the sport activities(PSA) in the military professional development education. Total 695 military officers were sampled and were ad-ministered a battery of questionnaires in April 2015 and 367 subjects of them fully responded to the survey questionnaires. The collected data were analyzed in the structural equation modeling and the results of the analyses were like these: first, the military cadets’ ego-orientation had significantly pos-itive effect on their intention for adherence to sport activities, and second, the military cadets’ ego-orientation had significantly positive effect on their performance in the sport activities of soccer, fitness, and Taekwondo. The results of this study have many suggestions and implications for research and practice of physical education. First, it is interesting that the effect of ego-orientation is stronger than that of task-orientation because many previous researchers reported contrasting results. That is, most of the precedent studies reported that task-orientation demonstrated more significant effect on the IASA and the PSA than that of ego-orientation because the task-orientation leads athletes to focus more on the dexterity of their performance than an outcome of a match. The contrasting results could be understood that most of the military cadets are familiar with norm-referenced evaluation system to reach up to higher rank, so they care more about the relative position than their skillfulness. Jung(2014)’s study supported the interpretation as military cadets’ ego-orientation also had stronger effect on their achievement in academics, military training, and disciplinary evaluation than task-ori-entation. Second, the results of this study suggest that researchers should concentrate on the context of the evaluation when they conduct a study of comparison of effect between the task and ego-orien-tation because the magnitude of effect depends on the context of the evaluation rather than the kind of achievement orientation. For example, the task-orientation would have stronger effect than ego-orientation in the context of criterion-referenced evaluation because a student does not need to com-pete against his or her peers as the score depends on the dexterity of his or her performance. In the context of norm-referenced evaluation, on the contrary, ego-orientation would be acceptable to the learners because they have to defeat other students to have better score. Third, the results of this study indicate that the norm-reference evaluation system in the military academy has profitable effect on the military cadet’s academic accomplishment because the cadets tend to make more effort in the competitive situation than in the cooperative situation. This study, however, also suggests that instruc-tors of the physical education need to use norm or criterion-referenced evaluation system to improve the military cadets’ performance as well as their participation in the sport activities. The precedent studies in the physical education research suggest that moderately competitive atmosphere in the sport activities would stimulate the learners’ concentration and performance, however, too competi-tive atmosphere would harm their performance.