Predicting collegiate athletes’ willingness to mentor teammates: applying the theory of normative social behaviour

ABSTRACT

Given the benefits of peer mentorship among athletes, there is a need to identify antecedents of athletes’ mentorship engagement. Based on the theory of normative social behaviour, the present study tested the hypothesis that there would be a positive association between athletes’ perceptions of teammates’ peer mentorship (peer descriptive norm) and mentorship willingness, and that this relationship would strengthen as a function of increasing perceptions of coaches’ approval of peer mentorship (coach injunctive norm) and social identity. Specifically, we assessed athletes’ willingness to provide task instruction (instrumental) and friendship (psychosocial) mentorship to teammates who played (a) the same position, and (b) a different position, as them. Participants were 173 National Collegiate Athletic Association athletes from the United States who completed an online survey. Results of multiple regression analyses provided support for a positive peer descriptive norm-mentorship willingness relationship for some, but not all, mentorship willingness outcomes. Though the statistical significance of interaction terms and R² changes were inconsistent, patterns of moderation were observed in some of the results based on simple slopes. That is, the simple slopes indicated preliminary support that the positive association between athletes’ perceptions of teammates’ peer mentorship and mentorship willingness may strengthen to the extent that athletes perceive that their coaches approve of peer mentorship and that athletes identify more strongly with their teams. The results suggest that coaches should overtly encourage and approve of peer mentorship, enhance their athletes’ identification with their teams, and provide their athletes with mentorship training opportunities.

KEYWORDS:

• Peer mentorship
• social norms
• social identity
• collegiate sport

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

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

Notes

1 Consistent with similar research (see Benson et al., 2016), we used f²= .05 as the estimated population effect size for our a priori power analysis (G*Power 3; Faul et al., 2007). With an alpha level of .05 and a power of .80, the power calculation indicated a sample size of 222 athletes was needed.

2 Tests of normality of all variables of interest returned ps = .005−<.001, indicating substantially skewed distributions.

3 For coach injunctive norm scores around friendship mentoring (Model 3a and 4a), a large proportion of participants (n = 91; 52.6%) selected the highest value (7) and thus its distribution was negatively skewed. Because of this, 1 SD above the mean exceeded the maximum possible value and thus there were no observed data above +1 SD (M = 6.16, SD = 1.24). Therefore, for these models (Model 3a and 4a), simple slopes were probed at low (less than −1 standard deviation), moderate (between −1 SD and all values below the maximum value), and high (maximum value of 7) levels.