Gratitude Enhances Change in Athletes’ Self-Esteem: The Moderating Role of Trust in Coach

Abstract

Self-esteem is a positive evaluation of oneself that can facilitate optimal functioning. However, little research has focused on its antecedents in sport. Accordingly, we adopted an interactionism perspective and proposed that gratitude, a dispositional factor, will enhance an athlete's self-esteem and affective trust in coach, a situational factor, will strengthen such a positive effect. Athletes completed measures of gratitude, affective trust in coach, and self-esteem at Time 1 and self-esteem at Time 2 after 6 months. Results showed that athletes with higher levels of gratitude increased their self-esteem over time when they had higher affective trust in their coaches.

Notes

¹The data for this study were collected in the context of a larger project supervised and funded by a series of research grants for the first author. Neither the analyses nor the findings reported in the present research have been reported in any prior work.

²Athletes participating in our longitudinal study completed the GQ-T, affective trust in one's coach, and self-esteem measures at bothtime points. However, our purpose was to identify the change of athletes’ self-esteem rather than the reciprocal relationships between constructs. Thus, only variables relevant to the current study are reported.

³We performed additional analysis to ensure whether there is a potential gender or age effect that will influence the obtained interaction effect between gratitude and trust in predicting changes of self-esteem. Results show that there is no interaction effect of gender or age with other key research variables (gratitude, trust, and self-esteem at Time 1) to predict self-esteem at Time 2, implying that our findings will not be influenced by suspected gender or age effect.