Relationships Between Academic Motivation, Self-Efficacy, and Academic Procrastination

In schools and the workplace, procrastination can be defined as freely postponing an action with the awareness of the detriment it may cause in the future (Steel, 2007).Procrastination is a widespread problem that is expected to increase in prevalence due to less controlling management strategies (Steel, 2007).Trends toward a decrease in occupational structure and direction with an increase in workplace temptation (e.g., computer games, text messaging) gives individuals numerous opportunities to procrastinate.Negative effects of procrastination can arise in multiple contexts.Along with failure to complete certain goals or tasks on time, procrastinating can cause a person disappointment and can lead to interpersonal problems if family or social responsibilities are unfulfilled (e.g., relying on others, letting people down, falling short of family expectations; Andreou, 2007).As organizations become progressively more lenient, the responsibility of performing tasks on time and with efficiency falls more fully on the specific worker. ProcrastinationTo help prevent negative outcomes, it is useful to identify reasons for procrastination.Extensive research has identified variables that are related to procrastination.Rabin, Fogel, and Nutter-Upham (2011) found that procrastination increases with age.Studies examining participant sex have yielded inconsistent results, but Özer, Demir, and Ferrari (2009) found that academic procrastination was more prevalent in men than women.Other variables shown to be positively correlated with procrastination include suicide proneness (Klibert, Langhinrichsen-Roling, Luna, & Robichaux, 2011), ABSTRACT.Academic procrastination can be a substantive problem for some students (Steel, 2007), and the reasons for and functions of task postponement have gained a great deal of research attention over the last 10 years.However, little research has examined academic motivation and self-efficacy as unique predictors of procrastination.We hypothesized that academic motivation and self-efficacy together would have a strong negative relationship to academic procrastination among college students, with academic motivation having a stronger relationship than self-efficacy.A sample of 101 undergraduate students (36.6% men, 63.4% women; M = 20.76,SD = 2.54, years of age) at a Northeastern public liberal arts university participated in the present study.Significant negative correlations of medium to large effect sizes between academic procrastination and 3 types of intrinsic, 1 type of extrinsic academic motivation, and general self-efficacy were shown.In a hierarchical regression model, academic motivation predicted academic procrastination, R 2 change = .33,F(7, 93) = 6.54, p < .001,but self-efficacy did not make a unique contribution to the model beyond the variance accounted for by academic motivation, R 2 change = .022,F(1, 92) = 3.09, p = .082.