Two Human Adaption Conflicts: A Review and a Demonstration with Achievement Goals Theory

A curious regularity is frequently observed when comprehensive sets of measures of concepts such as motivations (Ronen, 1994), values (Schwartz, 1992), organizational effectiveness (Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983), leadership behaviors (Lawrence, Lenk, & Quinn, 2009), and goals (Grouzet et al., 2005) are subjected to multidimensional scaling.  Specifically, a two-dimension solution frequently emerges in which two consistent oppositions are noticed: Preservation (security, maintenance) opposing Change (self-actualization, development), and Competition (power, self-interest) opposing cooperation (self-transcendence, affiliation).  We suggest that this regulatory reflects basic and conflicting adaptation challenges.  Therefore, we predict that two or three factor theories of motivations (e.g., Higgins, 1997) could be understood as a subset of the four poles of these two conflicts.  To demonstrate the viability of our position, we demonstrate how our position shed a new light on goal-orientation theory (Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Elliot & Church, 1997). Specifically, we demonstrate that the meaning of the much debated construct of performance-approach (proving) goal orientation can be understood as a reflection of the competition side of the competition-cooperation conflict and that the theory can benefit from adding a construct of amity goal orientation.  For this demonstration, we show both patterns of correlations of goals with values, consistent with our model, and spatial arrangement that replicates the two-dimensional structure observed by other researchers who applied multidimensional scaling in similar domains.