Examining the interactive effects of coach-created empowering and disempowering climate dimensions on athletes’ health and functioning

Based in Duda’s (2013) hierarchical and multidimensional conceptualisation of the motivational climate, the purpose of this study was to examine whether a coach-created empowering motivational climate moderated the debilitating effects of a disempowering motivational climate on athletes’ health and optimal functioning. Athletes (N = 406, M age = 23.1 years; 67% male) completed questionnaires assessing their perceptions of coach-created empowering and disempowering climates created in training and competition, enjoyment in sport, burnout symptoms, global self-worth, and symptoms of physical ill-health. Following the recommendations of Hayes (2013) and Dawson (2014), and using PROCESS (Hayes), moderated regression analyses showed that the interaction between disempowering and empowering climate dimensions was significant and predicted 1% unique variance in 3 outcome variables (i.e., enjoyment, reduced accomplishment, and physical symptoms). The Johnson-Neyman technique was employed to plot and probe the significant interactions, which revealed moderately strong to strong values of an empowering climate tempered the significant relationship between a disempowering climate and the three outcome variables. The findings from this study have implications for coach education and suggest programmes that train coaches to understand how to create empowering climates and avoid (or dramatically reduce) disempowering climates are warranted.     

“Scattered In Times”

Climate change is a temporally fragmented phenomenon: the causes and effects at work are dispersed over a remarkably long time period. Climate change exceeds human ability to forecast and quantify its effects in time. This creates serious epistemic, moral, and psychological difficulties and poses challenges to generating adequate ethical responses. Augustine’s understanding of time as a measure of imagination emphasizes the way in which human beings actively shape their sense of time. He sees “looking forward” in time as a matter of spiritual vocation that collects the self out of dispersion and connects to a transgenerational collective. A notable example of how this “looking forward” may be practiced is singing the Psalms. The Augustinian “temporal imagination” links the imaginative, affective, moral, and vocational dimensions of measuring time. This offers some preliminary avenues for reimagining a sense of time responsive to climate change’s temporal fragmentation.