Guiding growth: the influence of coach-created climate on passion, athletic identity, and perfectionism in teen female athletes

Coaches who create a predominantly mastery-oriented motivational climate where self-improvement and individual mastery are emphasised might see different outcomes in relation to their athletes’ psychosocial well-being than would coaches who create a predominantly performance-oriented motivational climate that emphasises intra-team competition and peer comparison. Three psychosocial variables that might be impacted by the coach-created motivational climate include passion, athletic identity, and perfectionism. This study was conducted to examine potential links between the coach-initiated motivational climate and these three dispositional variables in a sample of older adolescent athletes. Self-report questionnaires were administered to 224 female athletes ranging in age from 16 to 18 years. Data were analysed using both variable-centred (canonical correlation) and person-centred (cluster analyses with follow-up multivariate comparison) procedures. Obtained results revealed that a task-oriented team climate was positively associated with high levels of harmonious passion and perfectionistic strivings while a performance-oriented climate was positively linked to perfectionistic concerns. However, a mixture of the two climates did show some positive effects, especially regarding athletes’ levels of perfectionistic strivings. These results provide support for the idea that the type of team climate, as initiated by coaches, is related to the psychosocial well-being of their adolescent athletes. However, additional research is needed to investigate these relationships in athletes at different developmental and competitive levels of play.