Rodrigues David, Rodrigues Nuno, Rebelo Teresa
Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal.
Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Department of Psychology, University of Madeira, Funchal, Portugal.
Curr Issues Personal Psychol. 2023 Jun 1;12(2):140-151. doi: 10.5114/cipp/163181. eCollection 2024.
Drawing upon Motowidlo et al.'s theory of individual differences in individual performance, the current study aims to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between conscientiousness and individual soccer performance, by examining whether mental toughness, posited as a characteristic adaptation, acts as a psychological mechanism underlying this link.
Relying upon a concurrent validity design, 130 soccer players completed a survey including the measures of conscientiousness and mental toughness. Participants were also instructed to provide a subjective assessment of their individual soccer performance, by self-rating their physical, technical and tactical performance levels. Their objective performance was also measured as the total amount of minutes each player participated in official games, during the first half-season.
The findings showed that conscientiousness and mental toughness represent significant and meaningful predictors of both individual soccer performance measures gathered, i.e. individual soccer subjective and objective performance. As expected, further mediation analyses showed that the influence of conscientiousness on subjective performance is totally indirect, via mental toughness. Still, for the objective performance criterion, only the direct effect of conscientiousness was supported.
These findings support the merits of conscientiousness as a valid predictor of human performance across achievement contexts, namely in sports settings and specifically in the domain of soccer. They also suggest that while this personality factor exerts a direct impact on individual soccer objective performance, it seems to play a more distal influence on subjective performance, by enacting individual mental toughness resources. Major theoretical and applied research implications are discussed.
基于莫托维德洛等人关于个体绩效中个体差异的理论，本研究旨在通过检验被视为一种特质适应性的心理韧性是否作为这种联系背后的心理机制，来促进对尽责性与个体足球表现之间关系的更好理解。
基于同时效度设计，130名足球运动员完成了一项调查，包括尽责性和心理韧性的测量。参与者还被要求通过对自己的身体、技术和战术表现水平进行自我评估，来提供对其个人足球表现的主观评价。他们的客观表现也被测量为每个球员在上半赛季参加正式比赛的总分钟数。
研究结果表明，尽责性和心理韧性是所收集的两种个体足球表现测量指标（即个体足球主观表现和客观表现）的重要且有意义的预测因素。正如预期的那样，进一步的中介分析表明，尽责性对主观表现的影响完全是通过心理韧性间接产生的。然而，对于客观表现标准，仅支持尽责性的直接效应。
这些发现支持了尽责性作为跨成就情境（即在体育环境中，特别是在足球领域）人类表现的有效预测因素的优点。它们还表明，虽然这个人格因素对个体足球客观表现有直接影响，但它似乎通过激活个体心理韧性资源对主观表现发挥更间接的影响。讨论了主要的理论和应用研究意义。
