“My teammates think it is alright to fight to protect friends”: collective moral disengagement in team sports

ABSTRACT

Moral disengagement refers to a set of cognitive mechanisms used to justify transgressive behaviours in order to avoid self-sanctions and minimise negative emotions. Moral disengagement has been widely studied in sport psychology, but only at the individual level. Collective moral disengagement (CMD), which refers to the shared beliefs in justifying negative actions performed by the members of one’s group, has received little research attention. In this study, we aimed to examine whether CMD and performance motivational climate predict adolescents’ antisocial behaviour towards teammates and opponents in team sports. We surveyed 172 Italian adolescent athletes (Mean age = 15.41 ± 1.73 years; 51.7% females). Participants completed a questionnaire measuring CMD, performance motivational climate and antisocial behaviour towards teammates and opponents. We found positive direct effects of CMD and performance motivational climate on antisocial behaviours. CMD was also related to antisocial behaviour towards teammates more strongly when performance motivational climate in the team was high. Our findings suggest the need to consider collective morality to better understand young athletes’ antisocial behaviour in sport.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral justification
• performance climate
• antisocial behaviours
• adolescents
• team sport

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The a priori power analysis, with alpha = .001, power = .99 and a medium effect size (ES f²) of .15 (Cohen, 1988) showed that the sample size was appropriate for the analysis (G*Power 3.1; Faul et al., 2009). Part of this dataset was used in the two studies by Danioni and Barni (2019a, 2019b).

2 For this study, we used 11 items of the full scale (originally composed of 20 items, since it also assesses prosocial behaviour) after a pilot study carried out on adolescents practicing the four team sports included in the study. We eliminated two items from the antisocial behaviours towards opponents subscale since they were not applicable for the volleyball players who took part in the study, as volleyball does not generally present the circumstances for that specific behaviour, since it is not a contact sport (Kavussanu & Boardley, 2009).