Coach and Athlete Burnout - West Virginia University

Burnout 35
the two-way ANOVAs and multiple regression analyses performed on the swimmers’
data. Significant main effects were found for swimmers’ perception of a high versus low
degree of democratic decision-making behaviors and their scores on the exhaustion and
sport devaluation burnout subscales. This suggests that collegiate swimmers perceiving
their coaches to be more democratic in their decision-making reported significantly less
burnout on these subscales than those swimmers’ perceiving their coaches to use fewer
democratic decision-making behaviors. In addition, perception of decision-making style
was found to significantly predict all three subscales of burnout among collegiate
swimmers. For the exhaustion and reduced sense of accomplishment subscales, the
perception of a democratic decision-making style emerged as a significant predictor of
athlete burnout. Perceptions of a democratic and autocratic decision-making style were
found to significantly predict the sport devaluation component of athlete burnout.
Collectively, these results suggest that collegiate swimmers’ perception of their coach’s
decision-making style, particularly a democratic style of decision-making, has some
influence on swimmers’ reported levels of burnout. When interpreting these results it
should be noted that the effect sizes generated by the ANOVA analyses were small in
nature. Further, the coefficientss of determination for each of the significant regression
models were small, suggesting that the predictive value of decision-making style only
accounted for between seven and sixteen percent of the variance in burnout scores.
It is of interest that swimmers’ perception of a democratic decision-making style
emerged from the analyses as the more salient of the two types of decision-making styles.
A likely explanation for this finding may rest in the type of sport used for the present
research. Weinberg and Gould (1999) noted that athletes participating in interactive,