Study of The Relationship Between Emotional Intelligence and Goal Commitment Levels in Athletes

Abstract

The aim of the study is to investigate the relationship between emotional intelligence and goal commitment levels in athletes doing individual and team sports. The study group of the research consists of 427 licensed athletes who study at Sports Sciences Faculties of 6 universities in Aegean Region of Turkey in 2018-2019 academic year. In order to measure the level of goal commitment and emotional intelligence in athletes ‘Emotional Intelligent Scale’ and ‘Goal Commitment Scale’ were used in the current study. In order to find answers to the sub-problems of the study, t-Test, Pearson correlation coefficient analysis and Cohen’s d analysis were used. The results obtained from the analyses revealed that the goal commitment and emotional intelligence mean scores of the female athletes doing individual or team sports are higher than those of the male athletes. Moreover, the mean scores of the athletes doing team sports were found to be higher than those of the athletes doing individual sports and the emotional intelligence mean score of the professional athletes doing individual sports was found to be higher than that of the amateur athletes. According to the results of the correlation analysis, there is a significant correlation between the goal commitment and emotional intelligence mean scores of both the athletes doing individual sports and the athletes doing team sports. As a conclusion, regardless of being engaged in an individual sport or a team sport, increasing emotional intelligence was found to be leading an increase in goal commitment in both of the groups. This positive correlation is believed to make important contributions to literature and academicians working in this field, coaches, conditioners and sports psychologists to achieve high level of achievement and performance.