Winning With Personality: Underscoring Antecedents for College Students’ Motives for Team Identification

Abstract

While collegiate athletic departments seek new ways to engage fans, this study proposes a novel approach for understanding sport fans’ motivations by examining how they moderate the relationship between one’s psychological personality traits and one’s level of team identification. Coupling underlying personality traits to subsequent motivations for team identification provides unique psychographics about the target audience, which may assist marketing professionals by revealing which type of people are drawn to sport, and more importantly, why. College students from three universities were surveyed, and results suggest sport fans’ motivations and team identities both exist due to underlying personality traits, thus advancing sport motivation research while simultaneously examining the role of personality in sport-related behaviors.