Merits and limitations of latent profile approaches to teachers’ achievement goals: A multi-study analysis

Research into teacher motivation has shown that teachers’ achievement goal pursuit matters, for teachers themselves (e.g., their well-being) and teaching outcomes. While most research has followed a variable-centered approach, a multiple goal perspective has also emerged within, postulating that individuals pursue different combinations of achievement goals, or goal profiles, that might be differentially adaptive or maladaptive. The latter perspective has inspired much person-centered research on students resulting in many different profiles that often primarily differed by level differences, which limits the usefulness of this approach. In the present work, we analyzed achievement goal profiles of teachers and their usefulness by investigating whether psychologically meaningful, coherent, and generalizable profiles can be found in different populations, how such profiles are associated with teachers’ self-efficacy and work-related distress, and how powerful they are beyond a variable-centered approach. Using data from three study sets (total N = 3,681) from different countries (Israel, Germany) and different institution types (schools, universities), we found six psychologically meaningful and largely generalizable goal profiles that can be helpful in describing teachers’ goal pursuit. However, several profiles primarily differed by strength of performance goals and not by further qualitative differences, which limits the usefulness of this approach for describing differences in the quality of motivations. Further, the goal profiles had little incremental explanatory value beyond well-known effects of individual goals in explaining self-efficacy and work-related distress (ΔR² < .03). Given these findings, we critically evaluate the use of achievement goal profiles for studying the motivation of teachers (and by extension possibly also students).