30.3: Organizational Stress in Other Performers

So far, this chapter has focused exclusively on the organizational stress experiences of competitive sport performers. However, it is clear that an athlete’s well-being, development, and success in sport is often the outcome of positive relationships, instructions, support, and care that they have received from various individuals who also operate (directly or indirectly) within the same sport organizational environments. For these reasons, sport psychology researchers have begun to explore the organizational stress experience as it pertains to other performers in sport. To date, these have included coaches, parents, referees/officials, sport science and management staff. Below, we briefly outline some of the main findings on coaches’ and parents’ experiences of organizational stress. Due to space limitations, we provide suggestions for further reading on the stress experiences of referee/officials (Dorsch & Paskevich, 2007; Neil et al., 2013) and sport science and management staff (Arnold et al., 2019; Fletcher et al., 2011) at the end of this chapter.

30.3.1. Coaches

Since the work of Frey (2007), sport psychology researchers have examined the stress experiences of coaches, partly because coaches’ stress may impact on their relationships with athletes (Thelwell et al., 2017), and, also because stress that is unmanageable could lead to burnout and coach turnover (Kilo & Hassmén, 2016). In a systematic review conducted by Norris et al. (2017), 24 studies that had examined stress in coaches were synthesized. It was concluded from this review that coaches encounter numerous demands relating to their performance and that they also encounter a series of stressors relating to the teams and organizations in which they coach. The organizational stressors reported in this systematic review included workload (e.g., extended working hours, completing multiple coach roles), relationships (e.g., poor communication from managers, relationships with the performers and teams they coach), and career development concerns (e.g., job insecurity) to name a few (see Chapter 29; Didymus et al., 2021). The issues of workload and work-home imbalance are some of the most cited stressors that coaches report as being stressful, and studies continue to highlight that these factors are closely linked to burnout and intentions to leave the coaching profession (Bentzen et al., 2016; Kilo & Hassmén, 2016; Knight et al., 2015; Potts et al., 2019). On the basis that coaches encounter a vast range of stressors, researchers have developed and validated a measure to assess how stressors are linked to various well-being and performance outcomes for coaches. Despite currently only being validated for use among coaches in South Africa, Kubayi et al. (2018) have made promising progress toward the quantitative measurement of stressors when developing the Stressors in Sports Coaching Questionnaire (SSCQ). This questionnaire assesses coaches’ perceptions of the environmental, task-related, performance, and athlete stressors that they encounter in their roles. Within this questionnaire, a variety of items relate to organizational related demands such as the coach’s role, their relationships with athletes and staff, the work-home interface, and requirements to travel.

How coaches cognitively appraise and cope with organizational stressors has also received some attention (Didymus, 2017). Moreover, researchers have given consideration to how coaches and their athletes may communicate with and protect one another when using dyadic coping efforts to manage shared stressors (Staff et al., 2017). Taken together, these studies on coach stress that incorporate information about organizational stress transactions demonstrate the need to examine the environmental, personal, and relational factors that may influence how coaches cope with stressors in their vocational and occupational roles. In addition, with continued reports of stress among coaches both anecdotally and in research evidence, advances need to be made in developing interventions to support coaches’ well-being.

30.3.2. Parents

It is starting to be more commonly recognized that parents of sport performers experience organizational stressors that can impact their own experiences, those of their children, and the coaches with whom their children train. In a multipart concurrent mixed method study with 135 British tennis parents, Harwood et al. (2019) reported that parents experienced organizational stressors relating to finances, time, coaching and training, organizing bodies, tournaments, and injury. These stressors were predominantly appraised as harm or challenge, and parents typically experienced anxiety and anger in relation to the stressors experienced. Interestingly, the parents experienced greater anger following competition stressors than they did following organizational (and developmental) stressors. The parents reported using various coping strategies relating to mastery, internal regulation, and goal withdrawal, which varied statistically in degrees of reported effectiveness.

Lienhart et al. (2020) conducted one of the most comprehensive studies examining parents’ experiences of stressors and coping in elite sport contexts. First, 1299 parents of adolescent sport performers completed an open-ended survey to identify stressors associated with their child’s sport involvement. Next, 16 parents participated in semi-structured interviews. Organizational stressors included demands related to health (e.g., doping and injuries), sport systems (e.g., scheduling, quality of training and coach, and communication), logistics (e.g., domestic tasks and organization), and personal investments (e.g., time and finance). For each stressor cited, parents were asked to rate whether the organizational stressor was easy to manage or difficult to manage. Out of 2,762 responses to this question, parents cited that organizational stressors were difficult to manage 73.43% of the time. Leinhart et al. (2020) identified six different coping dimensions that were used by the parents themselves, their child, or the sport organization to manage stressors. These included detaching from sport, information seeking, managing emotional reactions, avoidance, taking control, and parents providing support. The authors of the study provided participant-derived examples of how specific coping strategies were adopted to deal with specific organizational stressors. For example, under the coping dimension of detaching from sport, some parents spoke of trusting their sport organization to prevent doping,to help manage parents’ stress from a lack of information and concerns about athlete doping. In addition, under the coping dimension of information seeking, parents spoke of getting information from other parents to help manage a lack of clear communication from their child’s sport organization. This study highlights the complex nature of sport parents’ stress experience and suggests that educational interventions are needed to improve effective coping strategies. Such interventions would assist in enhancing the sport participation experience for parents, their children and sport staff working in elite sport organizations.