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Timothy A Pychyl Ph.D.

Don't Delay

MOTIVATION

Procrastination:
Motivation Deficit vs.
Regulation Failure
Motivation may be helpful, but it’s not sufficient.
Posted June 12, 2019

Readers of this blog will certainly know that I understand pro‐

crastination to be a problem of self-regulation. In fact, in the
research literature, procrastination is seen as the quintessen‐
tial self-regulation failure.

The key thing we have learned through research is that we

mis-regulate ourselves by believing task avoidance will make
us feel better, or that we give in to it to feel good. This under‐
standing of self-regulation failure has prompted me and my
colleagues to embrace the mood-repair model of procrasti‐
nation as a theoretical framework for understanding
procrastination.

Axel Grund and Stefan Fries at Bielefeld University

(Germany) have proposed that there may be another way to
think about procrastination: a motivational approach. In a
nutshell, they argue that procrastination occurs because peo‐
pleuse
We pursue goals
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or needs. They note that there is a fundamental difference
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between whether people are not able to perform an action
and whether or not they want to perform this action. Not
everyone is motivated to do the same things, so Grund and
Fries think that procrastination may be better understood by
acknowledging the motivation behind our behavior choices.

Grund and Fries conducted three studies to demonstrate evi‐

dence for their motivational approach. In Study One, they ex‐
plored whether one’s orientation towards achievement ver‐
sus well-being predicted procrastination. They reasoned that
when students in their sample preferred diversion and com‐
munity more than rigid achievement goals, they would be
more likely to delay academic work. In Study Two, they exam‐
ined to what extent the self-determination of their partici‐
pants’ goals was related to procrastination. In other words,
did students procrastinate more on goals that were not self-
endorsed or were low on intrinsic motivation? Finally, in Study
Three, they had participants read vignettes about the delay
of academic tasks to explore how attitudes towards societal
norms might be related to attributions of moral failure around
procrastination.

The findings certainly support the importance of motivation in

understanding procrastination. Participants who more
strongly endorsed well-being value orientations over
achievement orientations put off academic work more (Study
1), and the lower the self-determination (intrinsic motivation)
of an activity the less likely it was to be completed (Study 2).
As the authors write, “We can conclude that procrastination
becomes more likely when individuals do not actually 'want'
what they intend to do and that 'procrastinators' do fewer
things they perceive as self-determined” (p. 125). Finally, the
results of Study 3 revealed that holding “post-modern, liberal”
beliefs as opposed to “modern, conservative” beliefs was as‐
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sociated with more situational attributions of procrastination
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such that the individual is not seen as having some sort of
moral failure as indicated by problem with self-regulation but
rather that circumstances were to blame. Although most par‐
ticipants did attribute procrastination to a lack of self-disci‐
pline, attributions such as “not having enough time for
friends” were more common among participants with higher
“post-modern, liberal” ideological beliefs.

I found these studies interesting and an important contribu‐

tion to our understanding of procrastination. Motivation mat‐
ters as do our attitudes. However, do these data really mean
that procrastination is better understood from a motivational
perspective?

Where I take issue with the interpretation of the results made

by the authors is their belief that these data stand against a
self-regulation failure perspective of procrastination. In fact,
they argue that “. . . academic procrastination occurs simply
because individuals are not motivated enough to study or are
studying mainly because of introjected and/or external rea‐
sons” (p. 128), adding that procrastination may even be con‐
sidered rational, or at least understandable. People can sim‐
ply lack the motivation to engage.

I think a more parsimonious explanation of their findings is

that a mismatch between one’s motivation and/or attitudes
with the task at hand is part of what makes a task aversive. In
fact, when the authors write about what makes a task or goal
intrinsically motivated they show that it’s equivalent to “be‐
cause I enjoy doing it” (one of four items use to operational‐
ize this type of motivation). Of course, the inverse of enjoy‐
ment is aversiveness, so it’s not surprising that we would pro‐
crastinate less on the task which we enjoy: The task isn’t
aversive.
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The key point is that while motivation or lack thereof may
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contribute to our procrastination, this perspective does not
conflict with a self-regulation perspective on our understand‐
ing of procrastination. The basic idea of the self-regulatory
failure or mood-repair perspective is that when we don’t want
to do a task because we find it boring, anxiety-provoking, we
resent it, it’s frustrating or it lacks meaning to us (all part of
task aversiveness), we avoid these negative emotions by
avoiding the task. We mis-regulate our emotions by giving in
to feel good. Procrastination is an emotion-focused coping
strategy, and a lack of motivation can contribute to the
negative emotions that trigger this coping response.

THE BASICS

What Is Motivation?

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What Grund and Fries have shown is how self-determination

and attitudes can contribute to our perceived task aversive‐
ness or the “why” to help explain the feelings captured by “I
don’t want to” or “I don’t feel like it.” The thing is, whether we
want to or whether we feel like it isn’t the issue in many cir‐
cumstances in our lives. For example, the students in this
study may want to get a degree as evidenced by their enroll‐
ment in a program and paying tuition, but they may not feel
intrinsically motivated to do a particular assignment. This lack
of motivation may make it “understandable” that they would
prefer to hang out with friends instead, but it doesn’t make it
a rational choice given their long-term goals. Procrastination
is still a case of self-regulation failure; a failure that has moti‐
vation as a causal component.

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Finally, I want to note that not all data collected about self-de‐
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termination theory and procrastination reveal the same pat‐
tern of results. I recall a paper presented at a conference in
Atlanta in 2011 when a Dutch colleague summarized the re‐
sults of his study which revealed that students typically only
did the work that was externally motivated. Why? Because
they had no other choice, they might fail or be fired if they did
not. In contrast, goals for which they held more intrinsic moti‐
vation seemed to suffer from problems related to self-
regulation.

MOTIVATION ESSENTIAL READS

When Your Dreams Change

3 Performance Motivators and 2 Demotivators

In the end, the takeaway message is that while motivation

matters, we can’t rely on motivation to keep us on task. Or, as
Steven Pressfield expressed in The War on Art: Break
through the blocks and win your inner creative battles, you
can’t wait to be in the mood. Just get started.

References

Grund, A., & Fries, S. (2018). Understanding procrastination: A moti‐

vational approach. Personality and Individual Differences, 121, 120-
130.

About the Author

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 Tim Pychyl, Ph.D., is a recently retired INTL
university faculty at Carleton University, he
spent his career researching and writing
about procrastination.

Online: Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D.

Read Next

When Your Dreams Change

Meeting Deadlines in Work Groups: Implications for the

Workplace
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