The Concept of Motivational Persistence – definitions, development and research arguments / Conceptul de persistenţă: definiţii, evoluţie şi suport empiric

The persistence, through its main features and its frequent association with continuity and perseverance, with prolonged effort and with resistance before obstacles, has gained along the years a positive valence in the common mentality, being often associated to a desirable personality feature. The present article was focused on describing the so called evolution of the persistence concept in the theoretical and empirical studies that have directly or indirectly tackled with it. Persistence has been associated and has helped explain various famous psycho-social theories: the theory of planned behaviour and goal setting, the theory of control or the theory of self efficacy. Furthermore, various empiric researches have been conducted on affective versus cognitive persistence, on persistence when in interaction with stimuli and rewards, on task persistence and persistence in study and, in general, with behavioral persistence. It was also presented a model that sees persistence but as a multi-phase functional process (Albrecht & Meier, 2003). In the end, it has been underlined that the theoretical background presented could be used for the definition and empirical isolation of a more complex concept that goes beyond the limitations of the previous studies that used persistence as instrument for measuring more complex variables. This concept has been given the name of motivational persistence.