Achievement goals in organizations: Is there support for mastery-Avoidance?

When individuals engage in achievement-related behaviors, such as working hard on work tasks, they have different purposes or goals in mind. Achievement goals describe these underlying aims for engaging in given achievement tasks and are thought to shape how individuals approach, experience, and react to achievement situations (Dweck and Leggett, 1988; Elliot, 2005). Performance-Approach goals refer to striving to be the best relative to others, whereas performance-Avoidance goals refer to a focus on avoiding being the worst. Mastery-Approach goals take a different angle and instead focus on an individual learning as much as possible about a task. The most recently posited and most contested achievement goal is mastery-Avoidance, defined as a "focus on avoiding self-referential or task-referential incompetence... [that entails] striving to avoid losing one's skills and abilities (or having their development stagnate), forgetting what one has learned, misunderstanding material, or leaving a task incomplete" (Elliot and McGregor, 2001: 61).