Coach and Athlete Burnout - West Virginia University

Burnout 34
coaches from burning out but may enhance the likelihood athletes experience burnout
(Dale & Weinberg, 1989; Price & Weiss, 2001; Vealey et al., 1998). This potential
incongruity served as the focal point of the present research. It should be noted, however,
that because many of the athletes and coaches surveyed were not from the same
swimming programs, between-group inferences could not be made. Further, this design
did not provide the opportunity to account for any team interactions between coaches and
athletes that may explain the perception of decision-making behaviors.
The Influence of Decision-Making Style on Collegiate Swimmers’ Burnout
As hypothesized for the athlete sample, collegiate swimmers’ levels of burnout on
all three subscales (e.g. exhaustion, sport devaluation, reduced sense of accomplishment)
were significantly related to their perception of coaches’ use of autocratic and democratic
decision-making styles. As swimmers perceived their coach to utilize more of an
autocratic decision-making style, swimmers’ reported levels of burnout on all three
subscales increased. Further, as collegiate swimmers perceived their coach to utilize
more of a democratic decision-making style, swimmers’ reported levels of burnout on all
three subscales decreased. However, although statistically significant, readers should be
cautioned as the strength of the correlation coefficients was small. Squaring these values
reveals that decision-making style only accounted for between four to eleven percent of
the variance in the burnout subscales. This suggests that there are other constructs that
may be accounting for more of the variance in burnout scores that was not assessed with
the present research.
The relationships between swimmers’ perceived decision-making style of their
coach and swimmers’ reported level of burnout were further confirmed by the results of