Peer motivational climate and burnout perceptions of adolescent athletes

ObjectiveThe role of social environment in fostering athlete burnout is understudied, in particular with regard to the peer social context. We therefore examined the association between perceptions of the peer-created motivational climate and athlete burnout in adolescent athletes while controlling for weekly training hours and perceived stress. We also examined potential gender differences on peer-created motivational climate perceptions.MethodAdolescent athletes (N = 206, M age = 17.2 yr) completed questionnaires assessing weekly training hours and perceptions of stress, task-involving (i.e., improvement, relatedness support, effort) and ego-involving (i.e., intra-team competition and ability, intra-team conflict) peer motivational climate, and burnout (i.e., emotional/physical exhaustion, reduced sense of accomplishment, sport devaluation).ResultsMultivariate multiple regression analysis with training hours, stress, and peer motivational climate variables predicting the burnout components showed a significant multivariate relationship with 24.6% of burnout variance explained. Canonical loadings indicated that lower scores on weekly training hours, higher perceived stress and intra-team conflict peer climate perception scores, and lower improvement, relatedness support, and effort peer climate perception scores associate with higher scores on all burnout components. Intra-team competition and ability did not contribute to prediction of burnout. Stronger prediction was observed for individual compared to team sport athletes. Gender differences were in line with expectations. Males scored higher on the two ego-involving peer motivational climate components, whereas females scored higher than males on effort.ConclusionThe findings offer insight on the potential role of social context in shaping burnout perceptions and suggest that attention to peers in the burnout process is warranted.