Empowering or Disempowering? The Impact of Coach-created Motivational Climates on Engagement and Team Cohesion in Rhythmic Gymnastics

Rhythmic gymnastics is a complex aesthetic sport in which coaches’ approach to athletes plays a crucial part. Despite coaches’ essential role in shaping athletes’ experience, the fragmentary research on the coach-created psychosocial climate in this sport limits our understanding of how athletes perceive the climate. This study investigates rhythmic gymnasts' perceptions of coach-created motivational climate and its relationships with athletes’ motivational and social outcomes. Eighty-eight rhythmic gymnasts completed an online battery of standardised questionnaires related to engagement, team cohesion, and the five dimensions of the perceived coaching climate. Autonomy-supportive and task-involving climates were key positive factors of athletes' engagement and team cohesion, both explaining over 44% of the observed variance. K-means cluster analysis revealed two participant types: "empowered" and "disempowered"; the first one accounting for 65% of our participants. The "empowered" participants reported highly perceived task-involving, autonomy-supportive, socially supportive, and low ego-involving and controlling climates, whereas the “disempowered” gymnasts reported the opposite. Furthermore, "empowered" gymnasts exhibited higher engagement and team cohesion compared to “disempowered”. These results are in line with previous findings and suggest that an empowering coach-created motivational climate may be an important factor in motivational and social outcomes among competitive athletes. Emphasising athletes' autonomy and task orientation while minimising the ego-involving climate and control might enhance athletes’ positive sports experience.