Consequences of prosocial and antisocial teammate behaviour in adolescent soccer players: The moderating role of motivational climate

Objective: This study ex­am­ined (a) whether proso­cial and an­ti­so­cial team­mate be­hav­iors are re­lated to ath­letes’ en­joy­ment, anger, ef­fort, per­ceived per­for­mance, and com­mit­ment; (b) the me­di­at­ing role of anger, en­joy­ment, and per­ceived per­for­mance on some of these re­la­tion­ships; and (c) whether any of these re­la­tion­ships are mod­er­ated by mo­ti­va­tional cli­mate.


Design: Cross-sec­tional.


Method: Ado­les­cent male soc­cer play­ers (N = 358, M age = 14.48 yrs) com­pleted ques­tion­naires as­sess­ing the afore­men­tioned vari­ables. The re­sults were analysed us­ing struc­tural equa­tion mod­el­ling (EQS 6.1; Bentler, 2003).


Results: Proso­cial team­mate be­hav­ior was pos­i­tively re­lated to ef­fort, per­ceived per­for­mance, and com­mit­ment and these re­la­tion­ships were me­di­ated by en­joy­ment. The re­la­tion­ships be­tween proso­cial team­mate be­hav­ior and per­ceived per­for­mance and com­mit­ment were me­di­ated by ef­fort and per­ceived per­for­mance, re­spec­tively. In con­trast, an­ti­so­cial team­mate be­hav­ior was pos­i­tively re­lated to anger and neg­a­tively re­lated to ef­fort and per­ceived per­for­mance. Mas­tery and (per­for­mance) cli­mates mod­er­ated the re­la­tion­ships be­tween proso­cial and (an­ti­so­cial) team­mate be­hav­iors and en­joy­ment as well as per­ceived per­for­mance, with a stronger re­la­tion­ship at higher lev­els of the cli­mates.


Conclusion: The find­ings high­light the po­ten­tial con­se­quences of proso­cial and an­ti­so­cial team­mate be­hav­iors and the im­por­tance of coach-cre­ated mo­ti­va­tional cli­mate in ado­les­cents. Fu­ture moral re­search in sport should em­ploy ob­jec­tive mea­sures to cap­ture ac­tual team­mate be­hav­iors.