Psychological Skills Do Not Always Help Performance: The Moderating Role of Narcissism

Abstract

Psychological skills are typically viewed as beneficial to performance in competition. Conversely, narcissists appear to thrive in competitive environments so should not need psychological skills to the same degree as less narcissistic individuals. To investigate this moderating hypothesis high-standard ice-skaters completed measures of narcissism, psychological skills, and anxiety before performing their competition routine during training. A week later, participants performed the same routine in competition. Performance was operationalized as the difference between competition and training scores. Moderated regression analyses revealed that narcissism moderated the relationship between psychological skills and performance. Psychological skill effectiveness depends on an individual's degree of narcissism.

Notes

1. Although the 6.0 judging system has now been replaced by the International Skating Union (ISU) Code of Points system, these data were collected and analyzed when the 6.0 judging system was still used in competitive ice skating.

2. Previous research has investigated sex effects in narcissism and has produced equivocal results (e.g., see Morf & Rhodewalt, [2001] and Wallace & Baumeister, [2002]). In addition, given the unequal split of males and females in our sample, we re-analyzed the data standardizing for sex. As the original results were reliably replicated, the sex findings are not reported.

3. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.