Elite athletes’ achievement goals, burnout levels, psychosomatic stress symptoms, and coping strategies

ABSTRACT

Elite athletes undergo intensive training and competitive pressure to succeed, making them susceptible to professional strain. However, they differ in their subjective reactions in the form of burnout levels and psychosomatic stress symptoms. Following a motivational perspective, these differences may be explained by the goals that athletes pursue. The current study therefore examined the effects of elite athletes’ achievement goals on their burnout levels and psychosomatic stress symptoms, and to what extent they can be explained by athletes’ use of adaptive coping strategies. Based on the answers of 125 German elite athletes, path modelling revealed that mastery approach goals were negatively associated with burnout levels and psychosomatic stress symptoms, while mastery avoidance and performance approach goals were positively associated with burnout levels. Coping strategies partially mediated the effects of mastery approach goals on burnout levels and psychosomatic stress symptoms. These findings suggest practical implications for supporting elite athletes through goal setting processes.

KEYWORDS:

• achievement goals
• elite athletes
• burnout
• coping

Acknowledgements

We thank Stephan Eska, Florian Berchtenbreiter, and Lukas Sprich for their help in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 When discussing coping strategies in the present study, we refer to strategies that have been empirically supported as adaptive within the athlete context. However, particularly for idiographic research (opposed to the nomothetic approach of the present work), it is important to acknowledge that what is adaptive for one person in a particular context may not be adaptive for another. Thus, despite our focus on adaptive strategies, individual and contextual differences are important to consider (see Folkman & Moskowitz, 2004; Pensgaard & Roberts, 2003).