The Relationship of Anxiety and Self-Efficacy with Task Orientation among Athletes

The study was conducted to find out if Anxiety and Self efficacy could be predictors of task orientation in a sample of 47 athletes who were national level, state level and university level hand ball players. The tools used included Goal orientation scale developed by Duda &Whitehead (1998), Sports Competition Anxiety test by Martens (1977) and Generalised Self efficacy scale by Mathias Jerusalem and Ralf Schwarzer (1996 revised 2000). The obtained results showed that, the variable anxiety was low among national level players when compared to state level and university level players. Task orientation was highest among national level players. There was a significant positive correlation between self-efficacy and negative correlation between competitive anxiety with task orientation. Anxiety was also found to be a significant predictor of task orientation among the athletes. The results imply that psychological factors need to be tackled properly to enhance sport performance.