Effectiveness of a college athletic department’s pro-environmental initiatives

Abstract

The current study seeks to determine whether sport consumers’ beliefs, feelings, and behavioural intentions differ when the consumers perceive and are presented with a college athletic department’s high pro-environmental performance compared to its ordinary PE performance. This study employed an online-based experiment and relied on data from 613 sport consumers in the U.S. Two PE performance scenarios were developed, and one of the scenarios was randomly assigned to a sample of the consumers. A multivariate analysis of covariance was performed to test the research hypotheses. The findings suggested that sport consumers who were exposed to a college athletic department’s high PE performance had significantly higher levels of feelings of gratitude and intentions to donate toward the PE initiatives than those who were presented with the ordinary PE performance. In contrast, there were no significantly differential impacts between high PE performance and ordinary PE performance on sport consumers’ beliefs and general feelings. Both high-quality and quantity PE initiatives can function as strong motivational and learning processes that formulate sport consumers’ perceptual and emotional engagement. This study contributes to the sport management literature by investigating the differential impacts of PE performance on the tri-component attitude model to fill the research gap.