Factors contributing to the retention of Canadian amateur sport officials: Motivations, perceived organizational support, and resilience

Abstract

Using an ecological systems perspective, the purpose of this investigation was to understand what motivates individuals to enter into and remain active in officiating, their resilience, and their perceptions of the support they receive from their sport organizations in Canada. A sample of 1073 (806 males, 267 females) active officials from 37 different sports provided individual responses to a demographic questionnaire, the Sport Motivation Scale, the 8-Item Survey of Perceived Organizational Support, the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale and by responding to a series of open-ended questions. Independent four-way (i.e. age, sex, sport category, setting) analysis of variance procedures revealed a number of significant differences, with younger officials (i.e. 15 years or less) more extrinsically motivated than their older counterparts (F(10,832) = 3.19, p < 0.0001), males displaying higher levels of intrinsic motivation to experience excitement in the role than females (F(1832) = 5.69, p < 0.02), and females demonstrating higher and lower levels of amotivation (F(2832) = 3.16, p < 0.04) in comparison to males in urban and rural settings, respectively. The officials in this study were highly resilient, with only 7.8% of the sample yielding resilience scores below the population norm. Younger officials (i.e. under 20 years) demonstrated higher levels of perceived organizational support than those in older age groups (F(10,831) = 1.99, p < 0.03), while females displayed significantly lower mean perceived organizational support scores in urban environments and higher mean perceived organizational support scores in rural settings than males (F(2831) = 4.53, p < 0.01). The results provide a baseline against which future studies of sports officials may be compared.