Table 1.

Summary of contemporary motivation theories.

	SDT	SCT	GOT
Main Concept	People are driven in their actions by a need to grow and gain fulfilment. SDT is focused on the role played by both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. While intrinsic motivation is related to the interest by doing a certain activity, extrinsic motivation occurs when the goal of an activity is an external reward. Intrinsic and internalized motivations are promoted by feelings of competence, autonomy, and relatedness.	Motivation is the result of a cognitive process which is influenced by personal, behavioural, and environmental factors. The subject’s judgment of their own capabilities to reach a specified level in the performance (Self-efficacy) is the main driver of motivated action.	The term goal orientation (GO) refers to the cognition of the achievement on the behaviour responses. Achievement goals are defined as the terminal point towards which one’s efforts are directed. Two different GOs have been described: In the performance GO (PGO), the subjects show motivated behaviours only to align him/herself with the community’s expectancy. In the mastery GO (MGO), motivated behaviours are characterized by intrinsic values of related actions. In the MGO, the required ability for task completing is supposed to improve through skills training. In PGO, the required task’s ability is a congenital fixed trait (entity mindset): in this case, the real motivation in task’s completing consists in showing to the community that the one is enough able to
Keywords	Competence, autonomy, relatedness	Self-efficacy	Mastery goal orientation, performance goal orientation
Main references	Deci and Ryan [2,3,13,14]	Bandura [11,15]	Locke and Latham [12,16]; Dweck [17]

Abbreviations: SDT: self-determination theory; SCT: social-cognitive theory; GOT: goal orientation theory; MGO: mastery goal orientation; PGO: performance goal orientation.