Coaches’ dehumanisation in sport: exploring antecedents and relationships with wellbeing.

Abstract

Overview: Dehumanisation is the denial of humanness, in which humanness is considered as attributes that characterise what it means to be human. To the author’s knowledge, this study was the first to specifically explore dehumanisation in a sporting context. The context used was team-selection decisions, widely conceptualised as a stressor for coaches. This study sought to explore whether dehumanisation was employed by coaches when making team selection decisions, what personal or contextual factors may predict this, and to examine whether dehumanisation may be protective for mental well-being.
Methodology: A combination of sampling methods were used alongside gatekeepers to recruit participants. Coaches completed a two part questionnaire, one before (n=193) and one after a team selection decision (n=104). Questionnaires contained demographic information, and measures of dehumanisation, Personal Sense of Power (PSP), Emotional Intelligence (EI), Resilience, Relatedness and Mental well-being.
Results: Coaches’ change in use of dehumanisation from pre to post selection was found to be negligible. This indicated that personal factors instead of contextual factors were of greater prominence when predicting coaches’ engagement with dehumanisation. Specifically, coaches’ levels of PSP, EI Relatedness and Resilience negatively predicted use of all three forms of dehumanisation. Moreover, it was found that all three forms of dehumanisation were negatively related to mental well-being, suggesting that engagement with dehumanisation is unlikely to be functional for coaches in relieving stress.
Conclusion: Findings suggest that dehumanisation does not significantly change following a team selection decision, yet personal factors do influence coaches’ engagement with dehumanisation. Thus, the key implication of this study is that coach education programmes seek to integrate training of EI, Resilience and Relatedness, due to the negatively correlations with dehumanisation, and dehumanisation’s negatively relationship with mental well-being. It is recommended future research focuses on practical manifestations of, and sport-specific measures for, dehumanisation.