Youth sport is a key developmental context for many reasons, including the opportunities it provides for building relationships with peers and its potential to support character development. Peers can influence adolescent sport experiences and shape their motivations, and different peer motivational climates may differentially support athlete character. Established models identify different dimensions of peer motivational climate, yet these models do not describe how aspects of peer climate may align with character. We therefore assess profiles of peer motivational climate in relation to a multi-dimensional practitioner-developed theoretical model for character development through sport. Participants were 655 adolescent athletes from the greater Boston area, in the United States. Athletes perceiving a mastery-involved peer climate, even with high intra-team competition, were most likely to exhibit positive character attributes at the three levels of character assessed: themselves, their teammates, and the game. This study also demonstrates the utility of practitioner-developed models for adolescent research.

Peer motivational climate

The fact that peers can influence youth experiences in sport contexts, and help to shape their motivations, is well established (e.g., Ntoumanis & Vazou, 2005; Vazou, Ntoumanis, & Duda, 2005). Prior research refers to the motivational climate as comprising the norms and expectations of the team for either performance/ego orientation (emphasizing social comparison) or mastery/task orientation (emphasizing personal improvement; Ames, 1992). Peers play an important role in shaping motivational climates (Ntoumanis & Vazou, 2005; Vazou et al., 2005) and, in turn, the motivational climate can influence youth outcomes and experiences in sport. In particular, motivational climates involving peers with performance/ego orientations have been associated with burnout (Smith, Gustafsson, & Hassmén, 2010), whereas climates promoting mastery/task orientations have been associated with increased self-esteem and commitment to sport (Vazou et al., 2005), and intrinsic motivation (Jõesaar, Hein, & Hagger, 2011). Prior studies have also shown that youth perceptions of their team’s peer motivational climate were associated with factors at various levels. At the individual level, athletes’ achievement orientations were associated with perceptions of peer motivational climate, such that athletes with high task orientation and low ego orientation were most likely to perceive high task-involving peer climates (Vazou, 2010). At the team level, having a successful season record or having a female coach was associated with higher perceptions of task-involving peer climates compared to teams with less successful records or male coaches (Vazou, 2010). Finally, at the level of how athletes approach the game, ego-oriented peer climates have been associated with increased gamesmanship (i.e., tactics aiming to gain psychological advantage; Ntoumanis, Taylor, & Thøgersen-Ntoumani, 2012). However, no team has a singular, uniform peer motivational climate; athletes on the same team may perceive different peer motivational climates (Vazou, Ntoumanis, & Duda, 2006) and those subjective experiences should be taken into consideration to understand links between team motivational climate and the behavior or development of individual athletes.