You’re not my dad, you’re my coach! When Paternalism Impairs Agility Performance

Objectives: We were interested in the impacts of coach’s paternalistic motivational speech on young high performance sportsmen and sportswomen. We suggested that their motor performance (agility test) would be diminished.
Design: We used a 2 (paternalism: presence vs. absence) X 2 (valence: positive vs. negative) design to create four types of motivational speech.
Methods: 60 participants read a description of an invented collective sport, followed by the coach’s motivational speech. After reading those texts, they were asked to do a motor agility test. They also had to complete an emotional measure on a 7-point Likert scale. We used linear regression as well double mediation macros in order to test the impacts of the coach’s paternalistic motivational speech on agility performance.
Results: The results revealed direct effects of paternalism and valence on two measures of agility performance. Agility performance was worse when the speech was paternalistic (vs. no paternalistic) as well as when the speech was negative (vs. positive). When we compared negative paternalistic speech with the 3 others, we found that the direct effect of negative paternalism on performance is serially mediated, first by anxiety and, second by feeling of (in)competence.
Conclusions: Acting in a fatherlike attitude might look like a good idea to motivate a sport team, using a little bit of father authority. But by doing so, in a negative way, the risk is that the team might perform badly instead.