Examining the relationship between perfectionism and trait anger in competitive sport

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between athletes’ perfectionist orientations and their dispositional tendencies to experience anger in sport. A sample of 138 male teenage high‐performance Canadian Football players (M age = 18.27 years, SD = .71) completed multidimensional domain‐specific measures of perfectionism and anger in sport. Canonical correlation (R C) results revealed a profile of maladaptive perfectionism (i.e., high personal standards combined with high concern over mistakes and high perceived coach pressure) that was significantly correlated with competitive trait anger (R C = .56) and the tendency to experience anger when playing poorly (R C = .47). That is, as athletes’ levels on three perfectionism dimensions increased (i.e., personal standards, concern over mistakes, and perceived coach pressure), so did their dispositional tendencies to experience anger in sport. The benefits of conceptualizing perfectionism as a domain‐specific construct, and the importance of considering all dimensions of perfectionism simultaneously when examining the functional nature of the construct in sport are discussed