Perceived justice of the coach predicts satisfaction and intrinsic motivation in handball and volleyball

Abstract

Perceived justice was broadly highlighted in organizational settings as an important determinant of the employees’ performance, intrinsic motivation and satisfaction. Since sport teams and organizations had many characteristics in common, it seemed likely that perceived justice would have a valuable influence in a sport context. For this reason, we aimed to examine the impact of the perceived justice of the coach on team athletes’ intrinsic motivation and satisfaction, in a longitudinal way. Additionally, we were interested in the influence of coach’s transparency, team identification, social cohesion and task cohesion as predictor variables. A questionnaire was filled in by 91 Belgian top handball and volleyball players to asses the different variables during 5 consecutive matches. Regression analyses were conducted to explore the variance of athletes’ intrinsic motivation and satisfaction that could be explained by the variance of the predictor variables, (i.e., perceived justice, coach’s transparency, team identification, social cohesion and task cohesion). The amount of variance that could be explained by the predictor variables fluctuated between 40% (match 1) and 69% (match 3) for the athletes’ intrinsic motivation and between 38% (match 1) and 60% (match 5) for their satisfaction. Furthermore, our results revealed that perceived justice of the coach by the athletes was the only predictor variable with a significant contribution on the athletes’ intrinsic motivation (p<0.001) and satisfaction (p<0.005) for every match. These findings clearly accentuated the importance of perceived justice since it was the most determinant predictor variable of the satisfaction and the intrinsic motivation of team athletes.status: publishe