The commitment of separate goal setting situations with collegiate athletes

The purpose of this study is to investigate commitment scores to goals in different conditions. There were three conditions in this study; coach set, athlete set, and coach and athlete combined set. Data came from 40 club sport athletes from a university in the state of Texas. Athletes were asked to complete three questionnaires with different instruction sets. The questionnaire was a Goal Commitment Questionnaire created by Hollenbeck and Klein (1987). Each questionnaire explained to imagine a goal that a coach would give you, you would create for yourself, or you and your coach would create together. Hypotheses for this study were commitment scores would be highest in the combined condition, lowest in the coach condition or very similar in the combined and self-set conditions. Results indicated no differences in the scores between the three conditions, suggesting that the hypotheses were not supported. Secondary analyses indicated that younger participants were significantly more committed to self-set and combined conditions. More experienced athletes were found to be most committed to the coach set condition. Females were found to be more committed to self-set and combined conditions. Team sports proved to be more committed to all three conditions compared to individual sports. Taken together, the findings of this study suggest that athletes’ factors (age, experience, gender, type of sports) may influence the level of commitment to achieve a goal. Results will be helpful to coaches when working on goal setting with their athletes. It will allow them to know who will be more committed to which types of goals. This can effectively help the athletes as well when attempting to create an effective goal for their season.