Evaluation of workshops to increase the empowering climate in sport teams

An empowering motivational coaching climate is based on principles of Achievement Goal Theory (AGT; Nicholls, 1989) and Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 2012). It primarily aims to foster intrinsic motivation in athletes (Duda & Appleton, 2016). In addition to empirical studies, there exists a coach education model which aims to create a coaching environment designed to increase athletes’ engagement and enjoyment in sport through motivational processes. The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of a newly developed workshop concept to promote empowering coaching. The dependent variable was the empowering and disempowering coaching climate as assessed by the coaches themselves. A preliminary data set of 21 coaches (n = 6 female) with an average age of 44.95 ± 12.65 years was available. Coaches were divided into a waiting control group (n = 8) and an intervention group (n = 12). All participants completed a German version of the EDMCQ (EDMCQ-D; Ohlert, 2018). The questionnaire consists of five factors: task-relatedness, autonomy-support and social-support, which are identified as empowering factors, whereas control- and ego-relatedness represent disempowering factors. At a descriptive level, an increase in empowering factors and a decrease in disempowering factors could be observed. However, in the repeated-measures MANOVA analysis, no statistically significant main or interaction effects were detected between the pre- and post-measurements across all five factors. Besides the reduced number of participants, potential reasons for the non-significant results could be the questionnaire, which is a self-report measure, consequently participant responses may have been affected by social desirability. The expectation is that significant results can be achieved with the final data set. Further insights can be taken from additional qualitative aspects which supplement the evaluation of the effectiveness of the workshops.