Einleitung

Research in the phyiscal activity domain has established the existence of two major achievement goals, namely task and ego goal orientations. A task orientation implies that people define success as personal improvement and consider skill acquisition and high effort as its main determinants. When an ego goal is salient success is defined as higher performance than others and high normative ability is considered as its main antecedent. Goal perspectives vary as a function of individual and contextual differences. Research has established that task and ego orientation are two non-related dispositions. Another research direction has examined the motivational climate of teams and physical education (PE) classes, revealing that people perceive differently the salient achievement goals in their environment. Sarrazin et al (1996) found that a task goal orientation corresponded to beliefs that sport ability is changeable and developed through learning but an ego goal orientation was related to beliefs that sport ability is a gift and stable over time. The purpose of this study was to examine the hypotheses of Sarrazin et al (1996) in the Greek physical activity context. A positive association among task orientation, perceived task-involving climate and an incremental conception of ability was expected. The belief that ability is a natural gift and the belief that ability is something stable were expected to correspond to ego orientation and perceived ego-involving climate. Einfuehrung