Personality, social status, and willingness to mentor teammates among NCAA athletes

ABSTRACT

The benefits of peer mentoring among athletes have been documented, but few studies have investigated why athletes are inclined to mentor teammates. The purpose of this exploratory study was twofold. The first purpose was to examine whether personality and social status predicted athletes’ willingness to provide task instruction (instrumental) and friendship (psychosocial) mentoring to teammates who (a) played the same position, and (b) played a different position, as them. The second purpose was to examine whether social status moderated the relationship between personality and mentoring willingness. Participants were 178 National Collegiate Athletic Association athletes who completed an online survey assessing the Big Five personality traits, perceived social status, and willingness to mentor teammates. Multiple regression analyses indicated athletes who were more extraverted and agreeable reported a greater willingness to provide friendship mentoring to teammates who played the same, and a different, position as them. The remaining Big Five personality traits and social status were statistically unrelated to mentoring willingness. Though interaction effects were generally nonsignificant, simple slopes suggested athletes who exhibited greater levels of openness were more willing to provide task instruction mentoring to teammates who played a different position as them, but only when they held high levels of social status. This study provides some of the first known evidence linking the Big Five traits to mentoring willingness among teammates, including the role social status plays in this relationship. The results may help coaches identify athletes who would welcome the opportunity to mentor teammates.

KEYWORDS:

• Athlete mentoring
• peer mentorship
• Big Five personality traits

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Participants in this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data are not available.

Notes

1 Consistent with similar research (e.g., Benson et al., 2016), we used f²= .05 as our estimated population effect size for our a priori power analysis (G*Power 3; Faul et al., 2007). Using an alpha level of .05 and a power of .80, the power calculation suggested a sample size of 222 athletes to detect significant interaction effects.

2 The regression model results revealed no evidence of multicollinearity (i.e., all tolerance values were .75 or higher), and the assumption of independent observations was also met (i.e., Durbin-Watson statistic values were between 1 and 3) (Field, 2018).

3 A post-hoc dependent t-test indicated the means were significantly different, t(177) = 9.13, p < .001.