Abstract
M.A. (Clinical Psychology)
Sportsmen and –women, professional and amateur alike, are faced with multiple pressures that often poses an ultimate hindrance on their performance. Some of these pressures include performance anxiety, fatigue and burnout, and negative physiological arousal resultant of performance and perfectionism. The latter, is often a construct that is misunderstood by athletes, coaches, sport managers and spectators, to have a purely negative consequence on an athlete’s performance and sports career. Theory (Flett & Hewitt, 2005; Gotwals, Stoeber, Dunn & Stoll, 2012; Hamachek, 1978) suggests, however, that perfectionism does not only have a negative consequence, but very often, it has a positive influence on a sporting performance. Thus, it is assumed that in the sporting society, perfectionism holds a false ideology.
The constructs of perfectionism and personality often correlates with one another, particularly because of the theoretical link between the personality trait Neuroticism, and perfectionism. This ideology is no different among athletes. Sportsmen and -women often strive for perfection within their performance, which is known to most as a debilitating phenomenon in which they need to understand and reduce. However, Gotwals et al. (2012) have found this ideology to be a controversial issue as they have found that in sport, perfectionism is less of a debilitating phenomenon and more of an adaptive phenomenon. In order to better understand the entire construct of perfectionism, it becomes necessary to analyse the relationship it has with personality.