Effect Of Perceived Coach-leadership Behavior On Athletes’ Burnout:The Mediating Role Of Fear Of Failure

Purpose: To explore the mechanism explaining the effect of perceived coach-leadership behavior on athletes’ burnout with the mediator of fear of failure and to focus on observing the different effects in perceived democratic coach-leadership behavior and authoritarian coach-leadership behavior.Method: Randomly selected 347 elite athletes in the nationwide(173 males;174 females)to complete the “Leadership Scale for Sports”,“Performance Appraisal Inventory”,and “Athlete Burnout Questionnaire”,and fitted respectively both hypothesis models of perceived democratic coach-leadership behavior and perceived authoritarian coach-leadership behavior with adopting regression analysis and Bootstrap.Results: 1)Perceived democratic coach-leadership behavior reduces athletes’ burnout,while perceived authoritarian coach-leadership behavior increases athletes’ burnout;2)Athletes’ fear of failure can also cause burnout,but due to that there is no effect of perceived democratic coach-leadership behavior on athletes’ fear of failure,the hypothesis model of perceived democratic coach-leadership behavior is not supported;3)The hypothesis model of perceived authoritarian coach-leadership behavior is supported because there is an effect of perceived authoritarian coach-leadership behavior on athletes’ fear of failure.Conclusion: The negative effects on athletes’ emotion from the authoritarian coach-leadership behavior is multifaceted by observing the two different kinds of perceived coach-leadership behaviors.It may not only cause athletes’ burnout in training and competitions,but also it may intensify their burnout by increasing athletes’ fear of failure.The study proposes,therefore,that coaches should adopt the democratic leadership behaviors to help athletes reduce the burnout in sports practice.