104 
A core part of personality are the goals and 
reasons that drive individual behaviors. In 
this chapter, we focus on the achievement 
domain and discuss how achievement goals 
and reasons behind achievement goals can 
predict achievement behaviors. The achieve -
ment goal framework focuses on the ques -
tion of what  is competence and provides 
information regarding the psychological 
direction  of achievement behavior (i.e., to -
ward or away from a particular standard of 
[in]competence; Elliot, 1999). However, a 
complete, coherent, and operative theory of 
achievement motivation must also address 
the question of why  one wants to be compe -
tent and provide information regarding the 
energization  of achievement behavior (i.e., 
the reasons behind achievement goals; Deci 
& Ryan, 2000; DeShon & Gillespie, 2005; 
Elliot, 1999; Sheldon, 2004).
In recent years, scholars have shown a 
growing interest in studying achievement 
goal complexes,  that is, the combinations 
between an achievement goal and an ener -
gizing reason (e.g., Grant & Dweck, 2003; 
Dompnier, Darnon, & Butera, 2009; Urdan & Mestas, 2006; Warburton & Spray, 
2014; Wang, King, & Rao, 2019). In par -
ticular, scholars have extensively used self- 
determination theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, 
2000) to assess the reasons behind achieve -
ment goals (for a review, see Vansteenkiste, 
Lens, Elliot, Soenens, & Mouratidis, 2014). 
Our chapter is organized as follows: First, 
we describe how achievement goals are con -
ceptualized; second, we provide an overview 
of how SDT-  derived achievement goal com -
plexes are conceptualized and operational -
ized; and third, we reexamine the extant 
empirical results regarding the consequences 
of SDT-  derived achievement goal complexes.
The “What” of Achievement Motivation
Conceptualization of  Achievement  Goals
The First Generation of Achievement 
Goal Research: The  Goal Orientation  Model
In the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, a group 
of researchers from the University of Illinois 
began to work both independently and col -CHAPTER 4
Achievement Goal Complexes
Integrating the “What” and the “Why”  
of Achievement Motivation
Nicolas  Sommet  
Andrew J. Elliot  
Kennon  M. Sheldon
The origin of psychology’s conceptual difficulties 
is to be found in part in the fact that the subject is 
young as a science but old as a topic of investigation.
—duffy  (1941, p.  178)