30.2: A Review of Organizational Stress in Sport Performers

Research exploring sport performers’ experiences of organizational stress first came about due to a series of observations that were made from studies (e.g., Gould et al., 1993; Scanlan et al., 1991) that attempted to identify sources of stress (i.e., stressors) in competition environments (Woodman & Hardy, 2001). These qualitative studies unearthed a range of stressors that appeared to originate from the sport organizations in which sport performers trained and operated. These stressors included team selection, financial costs, training demands, travel, coaching/manager leadership and communication issues, refereeing decisions, tournament organization, negative behaviors of coaches, relationships and experiences outside of sport, and negative interpersonal relationships. The discovery of these stressors lent support for the suggestion that the social and organizational environment in which sport performers function imposes numerous demands, for which there was limited empirical evidence relating to how they may be best managed (Fletcher et al., 2006). These observations stimulated a program of qualitative research that aimed to explore sport performers’ experiences of organizational stress and to identify dimensions of organizational stressors.

30.2.1. Organizational Stressors

30.2.1.1. The Qualitative Movement

Woodman and Hardy (2001) were the first researchers to directly explore elite sport performers’ experience of organizational stressors in sport. Since previous research studies had identified sources of stress relating to team environments and relationships (e.g., Gould et al., 1993; Scanlan et al., 1991), Woodman and Hardy (2001) developed a framework of organizational stressors that was based on Albert Carron’s (1982) model of group cohesion. Based on interviews with 15 elite athletes from the United Kingdom (U.K.), the framework highlighted organizational stressors related to four main areas: environmental issues, personal issues, leadership issues, and team issues. The main environmental issues that were identified included selection, the training environment, and finances. The main personal issues related to nutrition, injury, and goals and expectations whilst leadership issues most often included coaches and coaching styles. Finally, the main team issues that were identified included team atmosphere, support network, and roles and communication. Although this organizational stressor framework was later evaluated as focusing predominantly on group and relationship-related stressors to the potential neglect of other organizational factors, research using this framework with athletes from a range of sports provided support for the majority of stressor themes that had been identified (e.g., Fletcher & Hanton, 2003; Hanton et al., 2005). These studies did, however, identify some additional organizational stressors not previously reported, including those relating to accommodation, travel, and safety. These additional themes suggested that a new stressor framework may be warranted that focuses less exclusively on interpersonal relationships. In doing so, it was suggested that this may reveal greater insight in to a wider range of organizational issues that sport performers encounter (Fletcher & Hanton, 2003).

Based on this critique of Woodman and Hardy’s (2001) framework, a new conceptual framework was developed by Fletcher and colleagues (Fletcher & Hanton, 2003; Fletcher et al., 2006, 2012a), that closely aligned to research advancements in the field of organizational psychology (Cooper et al., 2001). In a series of qualitative studies that were conducted with elite sport performers (Fletcher & Hanton, 2003; Hanton et al., 2005; Fletcher et al., 2012a), support was provided for identifying organizational stressors as related to one of the following five general dimensions: factors intrinsic to the sport, roles in the sport organization, sport relationships and interpersonal demands, athletic career and performance development issues, and the organizational structure and climate of the sport. Table 30.2 illustrates these general dimensions along with some examples of specific organizational stressors that have been reported in empirical research.

Table 30.2. Summary of the Conceptual Framework of Organizational Stressors Among Sport Performers (Fletcher & Hanton, 2003; Fletcher et al., 2006, 2012a)

General Dimension	Higher-Order Stressors
Factors intrinsic to the sport	Training and competition environment, training and competition load, training and competition hours, travel and accommodation arrangements, nutritional issues, technological change, exposure to hazards and risk of injury.
Roles in the sport organization	Role ambiguity, role conflict, role overload, responsibility.
Sport relationships and interpersonal demands	Personality type, leadership style, lack of social support.
Athletic career and performance development issues	Position insecurity, income and funding, career and performance advancement.
Organizational structure and climate of the sport	Cultural and political environment, coaching and/or management style, lack of participation in the decision-making process, inadequate communication channels, no sense of belonging.

What is clear from this conceptual framework is that there are a diverse range of organizational demands that sport performers can encounter. Indeed, this has been evidenced in several sports that have been sampled since the publication of this framework. Similar critique to that of Woodman and Hardy’s (2001) framework was, however, evident. The general dimensions developed by Fletcher and colleagues were directly applied from Cooper et al.’s (2001) organizational psychology framework with working populations. A further critique was that the framework developed by Fletcher and colleagues (Fletcher & Hanton, 2003; Fletcher et al., 2006, 2012a) was originally meant for illustrating organizational stressors encountered by elite sport performers only, despite some studies providing support for the framework in non-elite athlete populations (Rumbold et al., 2008; Fletcher et al., 2012a). Subsequently, it was argued that a framework needed to be developed to provide a comprehensive classification of organizational stressors encountered by a wider range of athlete populations.

In addressing these limitations, Arnold and Fletcher (2012) conducted a meta-synthesis of 34 qualitative studies that had each been conducted to identify organizational stressors among sport performers. From this synthesis of literature, the organizational stressors were inductively grouped into the following four general dimensions: leadership and personnel issues, cultural and team issues, logistical and environmental issues, and performance and personal issues (see Table 30.3).

Table 30.3. Summary of Arnold and Fletcher’s (2012) Taxonomic Classification of Organizational Stressors

General Dimension	Higher-Order Stressors
Leadership and personnel issues	The coach’s behaviors and interactions, the coach’s personality and attitudes, external expectations, support staff, sports officials, spectators, media, performance feedback, governing body.
Cultural and team issues	Teammates’ behaviors and interactions, communication, team atmosphere and support, teammates’ personality and attitudes, roles, cultural norms, goals.
Logistical and environmental issues	Facilities and equipment, selection, competition format, structure of training, weather conditions, travel, accommodation, rules and regulations, distractions, physical safety, technology.
Performance and personal issues	Injuries, finances, diet and hydration, career transitions.

There were a number of noteworthy strengths of this meta-synthesis. First, by incorporating all of the known published and unpublished studies that had been conducted up until 2011, it was possible to identify a greater commonality of organizational stressors encountered across sports, competitive standards, ages, sex, and nationalities. Second, the synthesis provides the most comprehensive classification of organizational stressors identified to date. Third, contemporary qualitative studies continue to provide support for this framework, despite often identifying new and unique stressors in specific team and organizational contexts that are beyond typical comparison (e.g., Arnold et al., 2017a; Didymus & Fletcher, 2012, 2017a; Rumbold et al., 2018; Smith et al., 2017; Whittingham et al., 2020). The findings of this meta-synthesis were seminal in initiating the development and validation of the Organizational Stressor Indicator for Sport Performers (OSI-SP; Arnold et al., 2013). In doing so, this questionnaire facilitated quantitative research that examined organizational stressors in sport performers.

Learning Exercise One

Tables 30.2 and 30.3 illustrate two frameworks by which organizational stressors can be classified in competitive sport performers. As a comparison, what are some of the common stressors that both frameworks share? Can you spot any themes from one stressor framework that don’t appear to be highlighted in the other framework? Why do you think this might be?

30.2.1.2. The Quantitative Movement

A key argument that led to the development of a questionnaire designed to measure organizational stressors was the notion that it is unlikely that all organizational stressors will lead to negative outcomes for an athlete’s well-being and performance. It was therefore argued that researchers need to demonstrate which organizational stressors are related to which outcomes and in what ways. One way to address this challenge was through the examination of the situational aspects of stressors; namely the degree to which each organizational stressor encountered by athletes varies according to their frequency (i.e., how often the organizational stressors occur), their intensity (i.e., how demanding the stressors are for the individual), and their duration (i.e., how long the stressors occur for). The OSI-SP (Arnold et al., 2013) was developed and evaluated to assess these three dimensions of organizational stressors in five different subscales (see Table 30.4). The 23-item questionnaire measures the organizational stressors that sport performers have encountered as part of their participation in competitive sport over the past month (e.g., “In the past month, I have experienced pressure associated with ...”). For each of the 23 items, athletes are required to complete three rating scales with options ranging from 0 to 5. The scales include frequency (“how often did this pressure place a demand on you?”; 0 = never, 5 = always), intensity (“how demanding was this pressure?”; 0 = no demand, 5 = very high), and duration (“how long did this pressure place a demand on you?”; 0 = no time, 5 = a very long time).

Table 30.4. Subscales of the 23-item Organizational Stressor Indicator for Sport Performers (OSI-SP; Arnold et al., 2013)

Subscale	Subscale Description	Example Questionnaire Item
Goals and development (6 items)	An individual’s feedback, progression, and transitions within their sport.	... the development of my sporting career”
Logistics and operations(9 items)	The arrangement and implementation of procedures for training and/or competition.	... travelling to or from training or competitions”
Team and culture(4 items)	The attitudes and behavior within the team.	... the atmosphere surrounding my team”
Coaching (2 items)	The coach’s personality and interpersonal skills.	... my coach’s personality”
Selection (2 items)	How sport performers are chosen for teams and/or competitions.	... how my team is selected”

Demographic differences in athletes’ experiences of organizational stressors have been identified using the OSI-SP. For example, in one of the first cross-sectional studies using the OSI-SP (Arnold et al., 2015), demographic differences were identified in a large sample (N = 1277) of sport performers of varying ages, sports, sex, and competitive standards. These findings demonstrated sex differences in the frequency, intensity, and duration of different organizational stressor subscales. Specifically, males rated themselves higher than females in experiencing logistical and operational stressors for all ratings of frequency, intensity, and duration. In comparison, females rated themselves higher on selection issues than males for all ratings.

Differences in subscale stressors were also observed for individual versus team sport performers. Team sport performers rated themselves higher than individual sport performers for three of the five stressor subscales (logistics and operations, team and culture, selection; for all ratings). A series of other findings has demonstrated that national and international sport performers rated themselves higher in all five subscales in comparison to athletes of different competitive standards (Arnold et al., 2013). These findings were important from an applied perspective as they highlighted that a ”one size fits all” approach to developing stress management interventions would not make sense since the experience of organizational stressors may vary based on personal and sporting demographics. These demographic differences in experiencing stressors could lend support to the suggestion that not all stressors will lead to negative outcomes. To further explore this idea, studies are, in recent years, very much focused on identifying statistical relationships between organizational stressor subscales (and ratings of frequency, intensity, and duration) in relation to various stress components (e.g., Arnold et al., 2017, 2018; Bartholomew et al., 2017), physical and mental well-being (e.g., Larner et al., 2017; Simms et al., 2020), and performance outcomes (e.g., Roberts et al., 2019; Tamminen et al., 2018).

These quantitative studies suggest that the situational dimensions of frequency, intensity, and duration are not consistently applied across studies. For example, some studies report statistical relationships between specific stressor subscales/dimensions (e.g., team and culture frequency) and outcomes (Arnold et al., 2017b), whilst other studies focus purely on reporting the findings of specific situational dimensions, such as frequency for each subscale (e.g., Tamminen et al., 2018), or even totaling the frequency for all organizational stressor items regardless of subscale (e.g., Larner et al., 2017). This makes it difficult to tackle the original purpose of developing the OSI-SP, which was to examine which organizational stressors are related to which outcomes and in what ways. Whilst most of the aforementioned research has been conducted using cross-sectional research designs, contemporary studies in the area are beginning to examine organizational stressors temporally (Roberts et al., 2019; Tamminen et al., 2018) and longitudinally (Kristiansen et al., 2019; Larner et al., 2016; Simms et al., 2020).

The qualitative studies on organizational stressors have identified a wealth of common demands that are encountered by athletes who participate in a diverse range of sports. In addition, the quantitative studies in this area are continuing to show the ways in which organizational stressors may be related to different well-being and performance outcomes. However, a fundamental limitation in exclusively focusing on the main effect of organizational stressors for well-being alone is the degree to which individuals might appraise, respond to, and cope with their organizational environment differently. These mediating processes, as outlined by theorist Lazarus (1991, 1999), require greater attention. Sport psychology researchers are now beginning to acknowledge the importance of cognitive appraisals, and emotional and coping processes in mediating the potential influence of organizational stressors on various well-being and performance outcomes for sport performers. The following section outlines some of the research conducted to date that has explored sport performers’ cognitive appraisals of, and emotional and coping responses to, organizational stressors as a means of more fully applying Lazarus’ (1991) transactional conceptualization of organizational stress.

30.2.2. Appraisals and Emotional and Coping Responses to Organizational Stressors

30.2.2.1. Appraisals

In the past decade, a series of qualitative studies have sought to explore how competitive sport performers cognitively appraise the organizational stressors that they encounter. For example, Neil et al. (2011) indicated that athletes respond negatively to organizational-related demands, but some athletes are able to interpret their emotional responses to stressors in a positive way for their performance. Although this study was able to distinguish between positive and negative appraisals of organizational stressors, cognitive evaluations were not examined in great depth so as to understand the different primary appraisals originally proposed by Lazarus and Folkman’s (1984) transactional stress theory. To address this limitation, Hanton et al. (2012) used a six-week stress log with four international sport performers who were competing in different sports. Their findings suggested that most athletes appraised organizational stressors as threatening or harmful, with little perceived control.

In one of the most detailed examinations of sport performers’ appraisals of organizational stressors, Didymus and Fletcher (2012) conducted a 28-day diary study with 13 national standard U.K. swimmers. Whilst the qualitative analysis provided support for previous studies in highlighting that many swimmers appraised organizational stressors as a threat or with a sense of harm/loss, the authors were also able to highlight that the situational property of imminence (i.e., how much time there is before an event occurs) was linked to the greatest number of threat appraisals, and that swimmers did also experience challenge appraisals. Other qualitative studies have provided examples of how threat, harm, challenge, and benefit appraisals may be linked to specific organizational stressors. For example, Rumbold et al. (2018) conducted a series of interviews and focus groups with a professional rugby union academy team (N= 40). Players in this study predominantly viewed a range of organizational stressors as threatening and harmful, including: making the transition from amateur to professional rugby, negative feedback, asking for advice, job uncertainty, team hierarchies, unfriendly teammates, and competition for playing positions. However, the findings also illustrated how some players appraised the professional academy team set up that they were operating in as beneficial. Moreover, some players appraised getting injured as a challenge to work on aspects of their conditioning whilst unable to play.

Whilst currently relatively limited, there is some quantitative evidence to demonstrate how organizational stressors may be linked to specific appraisals. In a study of 315 high-level British athletes who completed the OSI-SP (Arnold et al., 2013), Bartholomew et al. (2017) found that the frequency of goals and development (positively), logistics and operations (positively), and team and culture (negatively) subscales were all significantly related to challenge appraisals. In addition, the frequency of team and culture and coaching stressors were positive predictors of athletes’ threat appraisals. Significant relationships with threat and challenge appraisals were also observed in regard to the intensity and duration of some of the organizational stressor subscales. However, this study could be critiqued because it only measured general primary and secondary appraisals and, therefore, the athletes participating may only have been rating how they generally appraise demands as a threat, challenge, or harm/loss, rather than how they appraise each specific organizational stressor in these ways.

30.2.2.2. Emotional Responses

To date, emotional responses to organizational stressors have been explored in the sport psychology literature but to a lesser extent to that which has focused on athletes’ appraisals. The collective findings of a series of qualitative studies sampling a range of team sports suggest that athletes can respond in a variety of ways to specific organizational stressors. These emotional responses include: anger, anxiety, boredom, disappointment, duress, excitement, fatigue, guilt, happiness, hope, jealousy, relief, reproach, resentment, sadness, and shock (Fletcher et al., 2012b; Rumbold et al., 2018). Using a cross-sectional design with 414 sport performers across varying sports, Arnold et al. (2017b) found that no organizational stressors as measured by the OSI-SP were related to positive affect. However, the intensity and duration of goals and development stressors, and the intensity and frequency of team and culture stressors were found to be significantly associated with sport performers’ negative affective (i.e., emotional) states. Perhaps surprisingly, no significant relationships were identified for three of the five OSI-SP dimensions (logistics and operations, coaching, and selection) and negative affect. One of the reasons for this could be that cognitive appraisals are likely to be a stronger predictor of affective responses than organizational stressors themselves.

In a longitudinally focused quantitative daily diary study, Rumbold et al. (2020) provided support for the argument that cognitive appraisals may be strong predictorsof affective responses to organizational issues, irrespective of the organizational issues encountered. Specifically, this detailed study highlighted that daily threat and harm appraisals of organizational stressors over a five-week period of training and competition were significantly related to daily negative affective responses to organizational events. Similarly, daily challenge (positively) and harm appraisals (negatively) were strongly related to daily positive affective responses to organizational events. This study also provided evidence to suggest that stable threat, challenge, and harm appraisals over the five-week period were strong predictors of daily fluctuations in positive and negative affective responses to organizational events within a professional rugby union academy team. These findings offer the first quantitative insight into how daily changes in cognitive appraisals of organizational events in professional sport environments may be linked to daily changes in affective responses, and, how these relationships are still significant when controlling for a range of personal (e.g., personality) and situational factors (e.g., playing position, key decision makers in the team), that could potentially reduce the influence of appraisals on affective responses.

30.2.2.3. Coping

Researchers have investigated coping functions and strategies in relation to organizational stressors (Didymus & Fletcher, 2017a; Kristiansen et al., 2012; Kristiansen & Roberts, 2010; Rumbold et al., 2018) and appraisals (Didymus & Fletcher, 2014, 2017a; Rumbold et al., 2020) in sport performers from club level to international elite and professional competitive standards. In a study by Kristiansen and Roberts (2010), it was reported that elite Norwegian youth athletes tended to use different types of social support resources (e.g., tangible, information, emotional) to manage organizational stressors encountered at a major European youth competition. Similarly, in a study with U.K. based swimmers, Didymus and Fletcher (2014) reported that swimmers employed a range of coping strategies following each type of appraisal of organizational stressors. In a more recent study, Didymus and Fletcher (2017a) investigated transactional pathways between organizational stressors and their underpinning situational properties, appraisals, coping, and perceived coping effectiveness among high-level field hockey players. Interview data that were analyzed using content analysis highlighted a variety of organizational stressors relating to leadership and personnel issues, cultural and team issues, logistical and environmental issues, and performance and personal issues. These stressors were underpinned by the situational properties of ambiguity, duration, event uncertainty, novelty, and timing in relation to life cycle. The hockey players appraised the stressors either as a challenge, a threat, or with a sense of harm/loss, and most commonly used problem-solving coping to manage the negative outcomes of them. Support for some of the aforementioned findings can be seen in the daily diary study of Rumbold et al. (2020) in which professional academy rugby union players’ threat and challenge appraisals were significantly associated with the daily use of seeking social support to solve problems and regulate emotions. From a practical perspective, what these findings highlight is that athletes need to learn or be taught a variety of social support based and problem-focused coping strategies to manage the various organizational stressors that can be appraised as significant for their goals and well-being.

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30.2.3. Outcomes of Organizational Stress in Sport Performers

A series of studies have acknowledged the importance of investigating potential outcomes that may result from training and operating within structured sport teams and organizations. Studies have indicated that competitive performers may experience various well-being and performance-related outcomes, such as changes to their physical and mental health (Roberts et al., 2019), sleep disturbances (Rumbold et al., 2018), deselection, and dropout (Rothwell et al., 2020). Two common ways in which researchers continue to demonstrate outcomes of organizational stress include the experience of burnout and assessments of sport performance.

30.2.3.1. Burnout

In one of the first studies to explore the relationship between organizational stressors and burnout, Tabei et al. (2012) found that English and Japanese soccer performers experienced burnout symptoms (physical and emotional exhaustion, devaluation, a reduced sense of accomplishment) in relation to their training and competition loads, insufficient rest from training, and injury-related stressors. In addition, Japanese performers experienced some burnout symptoms in relation to authoritarian leadership styles and relationship issues with teammates. In comparison, English players appeared to experience more burnout symptoms than Japanese players in relation to selection issues and the formation of cliques in their soccer teams. A recent quantitative study by Fransen et al. (2020) provided support for some of these qualitative findings by highlighting that athletes’ perceptions of their teammates’ leadership is linked to their own health and burnout symptoms. In a cross-sectional quantitative study of sport performers and staff working in sport organizations (N = 487), Larner et al. (2017) found that the frequency of organizational stressors encountered was statistically related toexperiences of burnout symptoms. In addition, the relationship between stressors and burnout was moderated by individuals’ tendencies to express emotions merely for the benefit of aligning with organizational goals (i.e., emotional labor).

30.2.3.2. Performance

A variety of studies have taken different approaches to measuring sport performers’ subjective ratings of their sport performance in relation to organizational stress. In the first study to explore performance in the context of organizational stress, Didymus and Fletcher (2017a) reported that subjective performance satisfaction was an intricate phenomenon that was linked to athletes’ appraisals, rather than perceived coping effectiveness, for example. Using a cross-sectional quantitative study design, Arnold et al. (2017b) found that the intensity of selection stressors was positively related to performance satisfaction. A surprising observation from this study was that no other organizational stressors were statistically associated with athletes’ performance evaluations. Of the 14 non-significant relationships between different stressor subscales/dimensions and performance, nine of these showed negative non-significant relationships between stressors and performance, and five showed positive non-significant relationships. The findings of both of these studies suggest that the relationship between organizational stressors and performance is complex. The findings of Arnold et al. (2017b) may have been due to aspects of the research design whereby sport performers were asked to reflect on their performances that had taken place over the past month. This meant that the findings will have been subject to memory decay and the potential ramifications of retrospective recall. Another study that employed the same research design with a smaller sample of sport performers (Arnold et al., 2018)suggested that the frequency of some organizational stressors was negatively associated with subjective performance evaluations. This means that the more frequent an organizational stressor, the more negative the evaluation of performance.

Using a temporal rather than a cross-sectional design, Tamminen et al. (2018) conducted a study in Canada with 84 varsity athletes from a selection of team sports: field hockey, volleyball, basketball, and ice hockey. Athletes completed the OSI-SP, measures of perceived esteem support, and competition appraisals five days before a weekend competition. A week following competition, the athletes then rated their evaluation of their performance at the competition. The findings from this study indicated that whilst athletes’ perceived support and secondary appraisals were linked to subjective performance a week after competing, the relationship between perceived support and secondary appraisals was moderated by the frequency of coaching stressors (negatively) and the frequency of team and culture stressors (positively). Other temporal approaches have been used to explore the relationships between organizational stressors in the lead up to and on the day of competitive performance. In a study of military veterans, for example, Roberts et al. (2019) found that the frequency and intensity of organizational stressors was generally linked to negative subjective performance on the day of the Invictus Games.

A key observation relating to all of these studies is the reliance on athletes’ subjective evaluations of their own performance, which is likely due to the challenges associated with the objective measurement of performance in sport psychology. However, in judging selection to be an important longitudinal measure of performance for high level youth performers, Rumbold et al. (2020) found that professional rugby academy players’ use of some coping techniques to deal with organizational events (e.g., seeking support to regulate emotions) during a five-week training period was statistically associated with the number of professional senior club appearances attained five years after the initial data collection period. This goes some way toward illustrating that the ways in which youth performers cope with organizational issues during the stages of development in their sports may be linked to how well they achieve success in their sport in the future as an adult.

Learning Exercise Two

Think back to your experiences of participating and competing in sport. What examples can you think of where you may have personally encountered organizational stressors? Can you remember how you responded, coped, or behaved at the time? The above section on Outcomes of Organizational Stress in Sport Performers suggests that there might be difficulties in measuring performance in sport. Consider some ways in which you think performance could be measured differently to understand how organizational stress may lead to better or worse sport performance.