Introduction
Mental health is an important part of an individual’s overall health. It is a complex topic and can be examined in terms of a combination of subjective wellbeing and mental illness. Factors can influence one’s mental health either positively or negatively, and these can be described as protective or risk factors. Authentic leadership is a leadership style has been related to positive outcomes in sport. Competition level has been shown to relate to mental health as elite athletes often demonstrate a greater prevalence of mental illness than others. Sport type is another factor that influences mental health as individual sports athletes often demonstrate greater levels of mental illness and lower wellbeing due to a lack of social nature compared to team sports. The purposes of this study were to identify the relationship between authentic leadership and mental health, to identify whether competition level or sport type moderate the relationship between authentic leadership and mental health, and understand the process in which this relationship occurs.
Method
647 athletes (n=281 female) from a variety of sports (n=194 individual sports athletes) and competition levels (n=104 elite) responded to a short online questionnaire measuring demographics, authentic leadership, psychological capital, teammate behaviours, subjective wellbeing, and mental illness. Athletes were recruited via social media platforms, through university lectures and emails, and local sports clubs and colleges. Amazon vouchers were offered as prizes as an incentive to increase response rate. Data was collected using Jisc Survey and analysed on IBM SPSS Statistics.
Results
Authentic leadership was positively correlated with subjective wellbeing and negatively correlated with mental illness. There were no significant differences across competition level on subjective wellbeing or mental illness. There was a difference in sport type on mental illness: individual athletes had higher scores on mental illness; but there was no significant difference for subjective wellbeing. Neither sport type nor competition level moderated the relationship between authentic leadership and subjective wellbeing or mental illness. Gender moderated the relationship between authentic leadership and mental illness, as authentic leadership was not related to a decrease in mental illness in females, but it was in males. Psychological capital partially mediated the relationship between authentic leadership and both subjective wellbeing and mental illness. Prosocial teammate behaviours partially mediated the relationship between authentic leadership and subjective wellbeing, and antisocial teammate behaviours did not mediate either relationship between authentic leadership and subjective wellbeing or mental illness
