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For many years, achievement goal theorists have sought to situate students’ goals within the broader social context. Doing so must consider students’ relationships with their parents, teachers, and classmates, as each can impact which goals the students choose to adopt and their experience during goal pursuit. The goal complex approach is well-suited to this task. It asserts that a performance goal’s (i.e., striving to outperform others) effects depend on the reason for pursuing it: The goal predicts desirable outcomes when pursued for autonomous reasons (e.g., personal pleasure), but undesirable ones when pursued for controlling reasons (e.g., to impress others). Those studies, however, have ignored the audience that students are trying to impress. This study explored if a controlling performance goal complex’s (a) prevalence and (b) outcomes depend on whether the student is seeking to impress parents, teachers, or classmates. University students (N = 321) completed measures of autonomous and controlling performance goal complexes, the latter done separately for each of the three audiences, followed by measures of desirable (e.g., interest, efficacy) and undesirable (e.g., anxiety, help avoidance) outcomes. Students with a controlling performance goal had their parents foremost in mind as the audience to impress. Moreover, the outcomes predicted by the controlling performance goal depended on the audience: Maladaptive outcomes when trying to impress parents, but largely neutral effects when trying to impress classmates and several adaptive outcomes when trying to impress teachers. Discussion considers multiple new directions and implications for the goal complex model. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
