Perceiving team as safe and meaningful: Is psychological climate associated with perceived effort in elite ice hockey players?

Abstract

Psychological climate (PC) can be described as the extent to which individuals perceive their group to be a psychologically safe and meaningful environment. Further, PC is thought to be related to the degree of personal engagement of the individual in that environment (Brown & Leigh, 1996; James et al., 2008). The purpose of this study using elite hockey players was to examine the relationship between PC and a form of personal engagement - perceived effort (PE), while accounting for the nesting of players within teams (ICC=.10). Prior to a practice near the end of the season, players (N=160; 8 teams) completed a multidimensional measure of PC modified from an instrument used in the work setting (Brown & Leigh, 1996) and a 6-item PE measure developed for this study. A multilevel model procedure used 4 subscales of PC to significantly predict PE, accounting for 18% of the variance, most of which was individual level. Examination of the coefficients revealed that the role clarity subscale of PC was the only significant predictor of PE, with greater perceptions of role clarity (b = 0.36, p = .003) associated with greater PE. These findings suggest that when a player perceived the team to be psychologically safe, he reported working harder. Further, the emergence of role clarity as a key PC indicator was consistent with the suggestion that clear role expectations in a group are related to perceptions of a safe environment and to increased involvement (Kahn, 1990).