Letting Go of Gold: Examining the Role of Autonomy in Elite Athletes’ Disengagement From Their Athletic Careers and Well-Being in Retirement

Abstract

Retirement from competitive sports significantly influences former athletes’ well-being. We propose that disengaging from the former athletic career is a crucial factor in retired athletes’ adaptation. Using the theoretical framework of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) we propose that sport motivation at the career peak and motivation for retirement are important determinants of athletes’ disengagement progress from a terminated athletic career. We also seek to examine how motivation for retirement and disengagement progress predict retired athletes’ well-being. Using a mixed-retrospective/prospective longitudinal design we followed 158 government supported elite athletes who had recently retired from an athletic career. In two online surveys administered 1.5 years apart, retired athletes reported on motivation, disengagement, and well being. Results suggested that SDT motivation factors are important predictors for elite athletes career disengagement and well-being in retirement. The clinical implications of these findings for athletic career transition and support programs are discussed.

Full text

Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology, 2020, 14, 88–108
https://doi.org/10.1123/jcsp.2018-0029
© 2020 Human Kinetics, Inc. ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Letting Go of Gold: Examining the Role of
Autonomy in Elite Athletes’Disengagement
from Their Athletic Careers and Well-Being
in Retirement
Anne Holding and
Jo-Annie Fortin
McGill University
Joëlle Carpentier
Université du Québec à Montréal
Nora Hope
McGill University and
Simon Fraser University
Richard Koestner
McGill University
Retirement from competitive sports significantly influences former athletes’well-
being. We propose that disengaging from the former athletic career is a crucial
factor in retired athletes’adaptation. Using the theoretical framework of Self-
Determination Theory (SDT) we propose that sport motivation at the career peak
and motivation for retirement are important determinants of athletes’disengage-
ment progress from a terminated athletic career. We also seek to examine how
motivation for retirement and disengagement progress predict retired athletes’
well-being. Using a mixed-retrospective/prospective longitudinal design we
followed 158 government-supported elite athletes who had recently retired
from an athletic career. In two online surveys administered 1.5 years apart,
retired athletes reported on motivation, disengagement, and well-being. Results
suggested that SDT motivation factors are important predictors for elite athletes
career disengagement and well-being in retirement. The clinical implications of
these findings for athletic career transition and support programs are discussed.
Keywords:athletic retirement, autonomous motivation, disengagement, well-being
Motivation psychologists have long asserted that “all goals are not created
equal”(Ryan, Sheldon, Kasser, & Deci, 1996), highlighting how the reason(s) for
goal pursuit impact goal progress, attainment, and well-being. Building upon this
Holding, Fortin, Hope, and Koestner are with the Dept. of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal,
Quebec, Canada. Carpentier is with the Dept. of Management and Human Resources, Université du
Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Hope is also with the Dept. of Psychology, Simon
Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Address author correspondence to Anne
Holding at anne.holding@mail.mcgill.ca.
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framework, we propose that all athletic career terminations are not created equal.
Some athletes retire from an elite competitive sporting career out of their own
volition, wanting, for example, to pursue further education or settle down for a
family. By contrast, other athletes feel forced out of their athletic career, retiring
out of a sense of pressure and control, following frequent conflicts with the coach,
de-selection from the national team, or painful recurring injuries. This study
investigated whether athletes retiring for autonomous reasons are more likely to
psychologically “let go”of their former athletic career and adjust positively to
retirement, whereas athletes retiring for controlled reasons are likely to encounter
difficulties distancing themselves from their athletic career and adjust poorly to
retirement.
While career termination is a normative and inevitable transition for athletes, it
can be met with mixed adjustment outcomes such as “identity disruptions”(Lally,
2007), “career transition distress”(Taylor & Ogilvie, 2001) and decreases in well-
being (Stephan, 2003). Although this adjustment does not appear to be problematic
for all retiring athletes (Park, Lavallee, & Tod, 2013); there is evidence that some
athletes do experience serious adjustment crises when faced with retirement
(Alfermann & Stambulova, 2007;Lavallee & Robinson, 2007;Stambulova,
2016;Stambulova, Alfermann, Statler, & Côté, 2009;Webb, Nasco, Riley, &
Headrick, 1998). In the athlete retirement literature, many studies have considered
the reason for retirement as an important predictor of adaptive transitioning.
Specifically, studies have found that athletes’sense of choice over the decision to
retire is related to successful adjustment to post-athletic life (Erpič, Wylleman, &
Zupančič, 2004;Lally, 2007;Lavallee & Robinson, 2007;Lotysz & Short, 2004;
Stambulova, 2016;Stambulova et al., 2009;Webb et al., 1998;Wheeler, Malone,
VanVlack, Nelson, & Steadward, 1996). Conversely, involuntary retirement is
reported to be more distressing for athletes and is associated with poorer adjust-
ment outcomes (Stambulova, 2016;Webb et al., 1998).
Nevertheless, the current literature does not offer a theoretical background
rooted in motivation psychology for why retiring out of a sense of personal choice
and identification is more beneficial for athletes’well-being than retiring because
of internal or external pressures (Park et al., 2013). A theoretical background
rooted in motivation psychology may be beneficial for the literature to integrate
various findings on the subject, improve our prediction of athlete retirement
outcomes, and ultimately build more effective interventions for athlete transi-
tion/support programs. Self Determination Theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, 2017),
a macro theory of human motivation, may be helpful to address this critical gap,
as SDT makes important predictions about the power of autonomous, as opposed
to controlled, reasons for action on outcomes such as adaptation, well-being, and
goal progress (Ryan & Deci, 2017). In this study, we sought to apply SDT’s
autonomous and controlled motivation constructs to understand athletes’post-
retirement adaptation, by examining athletes autonomous and controlled motives
for retirement as well as their autonomous and controlled motives for sport
engagement.
During the retirement transition, we argue that a key process for athletes’
healthy adaptation is the withdrawal of behavioral effort and psychological
commitment from former athletic goal(s). This process of relinquishing effort
and psychological commitment from a previously held goal is known in the field of
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motivation and life-span psychology as disengagement (Wrosch, Scheier, Miller,
Schulz, & Carver, 2003), but has thus far not been studied in the context of athletic
career termination. The present study seeks to conceptualize healthy adaptation to
an athletic career termination as a form of successful disengagement. Moreover,
autonomous and controlled motivation for sport engagement and retirement are
used as potential determinants of athletes’disengagement progress and post-
retirement well-being. As such, we seek to understand the factors that facilitate
athletes’retirement and maximize their “post-sport”well-being. The clinical
implications for sport transition programs and clinicians working with retiring
athletes are discussed.
Athletic Retirement as Disengagement
The last two decades of research have shown that when the ideal time-frame for
goal attainment has elapsed, resources needed to pursue a goal become too costly,
or new life opportunities conflict with one’s existing commitments, the continued
pursuit of a goal is likely to erode quality of life (Heckhausen, Wrosch, & Schultz,
2010;Wrosch, Scheier, Carver, & Schultz, 2003). In such circumstances, it
becomes adaptive for the person to disengage, which means to withdraw behav-
ioral effort and psychological commitment from the problematic pursuit (Wrosch
et al., 2003) Following disengagement, adaptive goal adjustment involves goal
reengagement (Wrosch et al., 2003), which is the tendency to identify and commit
to new goals when unattainable goals are confronted (Carver & Scheier, 2005).
In the athletic transition literature, the term “disengagement”was introduced by
Koukouris (1991) to describe athlete drop-out experiences, but does not converge
with the definition the term denotes in motivation psychology. Numerous studies
have shown that disengagement from unattainable or elapsed goals can benefit
individuals’subjective well-being (SWB), as well as their mental and physical
health (Wrosch, Scheier, & Miller, 2013). SWB captures people’s cognitive and
affective evaluations of their lives, and is composed of life satisfaction (global
judgments of one’s life), positive affect (the extent to which one experiences many
pleasant emotions), and negative affect (the extent to which one experiences few
unpleasant emotions) (Diener, 2000). SWB is considered one of the most important
outcome measures in the context of studying adaptation to stressors and major life
events (Luhmann, Hofmann, Eid, & Lucas, 2012). For example, late-midlife adults
who disengage from important time-framed goals, such as bearing a child or
finding a romantic partner, benefit in their SWB and mental health when compared
with age-matched individuals who continue to pursue these goals (Heckhausen,
Wrosch, & Fleeson, 2001). Researchers have even found disengaging from
unattainable goals can benefit biological functioning (e.g., lower cortisol secretion,
lower systemic inflammation, and fewer symptoms of illness; Miller & Wrosch,
2007;Wrosch, Miller, Scheier, & De Pontet, 2007).
In the present context, we seek to conceptualize healthy adaptation to athletic
retirement as a form of successful disengagement, where athletes relinquish
behavioural effort and psychological commitment to their former career. Although
no study to date has examined the processes of psychological disengagement
in athletic retirement, this goal adjustment process has been studied in other
populations of retirees (Farquhar, Wrosch, Pushkar, & Li, 2013;Gagné, Wrosch, &
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Brun de Pontet, 2011). While the act of retirement may limit retired athletes’
behavioural involvement with the former sport, it does not preclude athletes
continued psychological commitment to and identification with the former athletic
career (Lavallee, Gordon, & Grove, 1997). Retired athletes may still be cognitively
engaged with the sport, may ruminate about past athletic experiences, or feel
conflicted and regretful about relinquishing the athletic career (for regret manage-
ment in retirement see Farquhar et al., 2013). As such, a failure to disengage may
negatively impact post-retirement adaptation and well-being (Wrosch et al., 2013).
Several aspects of elite athletic careers may pose additional disengagement
challenges for retiring athletes. Obstacles to remaining a professional athlete,
such as injuries, can often be overcome through rest and rehabilitation (Podlog &
Eklund, 2006), and competing psychosocial or non-athletic goals, such as settling
down for a family, can be delayed (Wylleman & Rosier, 2016). Furthermore, for
athletes to have reached a professional level of performance, they invested heavily
in the sport, rarely disengaging from athletic goals throughout their development
and careers, and were trained to persevere in the face of obstacles (Warriner &
Lavallee, 2008). As such, letting go of a career that required extensive emotional,
relational, temporal, and material investment may prove even more challenging for
elite athletes (Miller & Kerr, 2002). Consistent with the disengagement literature,
we hypothesize that athletes’increased disengagement would be associated with
increased SWB in retirement.
The Organismic Integration Theory and Motivation for
Retirement
The Organismic Integration Theory (OIT) of goal striving (Ryan & Deci, 2017),
developed as mini theory of SDT (Ryan & Deci, 2017), focuses on the quality of
motivation underlying behavior. Researchers distinguish between predominately
autonomous and predominately controlled motives, although both forms of
motivation tend to co-occur to different degrees in most complex behaviors
(Ryan & Deci, 2017). Autonomous motivation is characterized by a feeling
of choice and volition, and describes partially or fully internalized reasons for
enacting a behavior, such as inherent interest and enjoyment (intrinsic motivation),
because one believes the behavior to be meaningful and important (identified
motivation) or because it truly represents personal values and interests (integrated
motivation). Autonomous motivation has been robustly linked to sustained goal
effort (Sheldon & Elliot, 1998;Sheldon & Houser-Marko, 2001), increased goal
progress (Holding, Hope, Harvey, Jetten, & Koestner, 2017;Koestner, Otis,
Powers, Pelletier, & Gagnon, 2008) and increased goal attainment (Sheldon &
Houser-Marko, 2001;Smith, Ntoumanis, Duda, & Vansteenkiste, 2011).
Conversely, controlled motivation subsumes the two least internalized forms
of motivation: enacting a behavior in response to external contingencies, such as
the expectation of reward or punishment (external motive), or of internal feelings of
obligation and pressure (introjected motive). Controlled motivation has shown
weak relationships with goal progress and attainment outcomes (Koestner et al.,
2008;Smith et al., 2011).
In the context of athletic retirement, two motivational processes may be
important for predicting athletes’disengagement and well-being (1) athletes
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autonomous and controlled motives for retirement, as well as (2) athletes’autono-
mous and controlled motives for engaging with the sport prior to retirement.
Numerous studies demonstrate that athletes who retired voluntarily and planned
their retirement in advance felt higher perceived control over the retirement
process, faring better than retirees who felt pressured or controlled into retirement
(Taylor & Ogilvie, 2001;Webb et al., 1998). A recent systematic review of 126
studies examining athletes’career transition out of sport from 1968 until 2010
identified fifteen factors that have been associated with athletes’career transition
adjustment (Park et al., 2013). Notably, the “voluntariness of the retirement
decision,”defined as the degree of control athletes have over their decision to
retire, was a factor examined in 21 studies included by Park et al. (2013) in the
review. Park et al. (2013) found that 18 of these studies reported a positive
association between voluntariness of the retirement decision and the quality of
career transition.
Although Park et al.’s(2013) study was not contextualized using OIT, it
appears that many of the fifteen factors that Park et al. (2013) identified as being
important in the prediction of athletes’career transition adjustment can be
understood in terms of autonomous or controlled motives for retirement. For
example, athletes’interest in “career/personal development”showed positive
associations with the quality of their transition (Park et al., 2013) and can be
understood as an autonomous motive for retirement. Conversely, factors such as
“health problems/injuries”and “poor relationship with coach”were sources of
career transition difficulties (Park et al., 2013) and could be subsumed under
controlled motives for retirement: in both circumstances, external pressures and
contingencies motivated the decision to retire. As such, many of the independent
factors previously associated with positive or negative post-retirement outcomes
can be organized into OIT’s theoretical framework of autonomous and controlled
motives. We predict that holding more autonomous motives for retirement will
facilitate the disengagement process and increased SWB, whereas holding more
controlled motives will hinder progress of disengagement, with negative con-
sequences for SWB.
Beyond examining the motives for retirement in predicting athletes’disengage-
ment and post-retirement SWB, it may also be important to consider athletes’
motivation for engaging with the sport prior to retirement. Recent work in the SDT
framework has also begun to uncover how motivation for goal pursuit predicts how
athletes will respond when confronted with unattainable goals. For example, Smith
and Ntoumanis (2014) examined university athletes who were asked to imagine a
season-length sport goal becoming unattainable. These researchers found that
autonomous motives for the sports goal were negatively associated with partici-
pants’willingness to disengage from the goal in the hypothetical scenario of goal
unattainability. Ntoumanis, Healy, Sedikides, Smith, and Duda (2014) extended
these findings with laboratory study measuring athletes’autonomous and controlled
motivation for attaining an 8-minute cycling goal, and manipulated the attainability
of this goal on a cycling ergometer. Ntoumanis et al. (2014) found that athletes’
autonomous motivation for the cycling goal negatively predicted cognitive ease of
disengagement from this goal (i.e., participants found it difficult to stop thinking
about the cycling goal and let it go following the task). These studies underline the
importance of assessing motivation for goal engagement when predicting ease of
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disengagement. Recent SDT research examining the motivation for not engaging
with a target goal also control for the motivation for engaging with the goal. For
instance, previous studies have addressed unemployed peoples’(Vansteenkiste,
Lens, De Witte, De Witte, & Deci, 2004) and nurses’(Halvari, Vansteenkiste,
Brørby, & Karlsen, 2013) reasons for searching and not searching for a job, finding
that autonomous and controlled reasons for not searching contributed additional
predictive power in explaining search behavior and well-being beyond motivational
constructs that focused only on searching. On a conceptual level, there is a parallel
between these studies and our argument that both athletes’motivation for engaging
with their sport, as well as their motivation for retirement may impact disengage-
ment progress and well-being in retirement.
The Present Study
The present study aimed to shed light on the predictive effects of autonomous and
controlled motivation (for sport engagement and retirement) on disengagement from
a terminated athletic career by studying recently retired elite athletes. Specifically,
we examined how retired elite athletes’motivation for sport engagement at career
peak, and motivation for retirement, both affected athletes’disengagement progress
post-retirement. In turn, we sought to examine how athletes’disengagement
progress predicted their well-being post-retirement.
Our first hypothesis was that athletes’SWB would fluctuate as a function of
their retirement stage: that athletes’SWB would decrease immediately following
retirement and make a recovery in later stages of the retirement process. Consistent
with the goal adjustment literature (e.g., Wrosch et al., 2013), we also hypothesized
that disengagement progress from the terminated athletic career would increase
over time and would be positively associated with well-being in retirement.
Given the literature review by Park et al. (2013) we hypothesized that
autonomous motivation for retirement would both be associated with greater
goal disengagement and greater well-being in retirement. Additionally, we wanted
to explore whether motives underlying retirement would have incremental pre-
dictive validity beyond the motives underlying athletes’sport engagement at their
career peak. We had no clear hypothesis for how motivation for sport engagement
(autonomous vs. controlled) during athletes’career peak would influence their
disengagement progress in retirement. Because autonomously endorsed activities
represent a person’s values and enduring interests, letting go of an autonomously
endorsed sporting career might be difficult for athletes, resulting in decreased
disengagement. On the other hand, the feeling of choice and volition associated
with autonomous sport engagement might give rise to a more flexible approach
when engagement with the sport becomes problematic or unattainable, thus
facilitating goal disengagement.
Methods
Participants
We recruited 158 government-supported Canadian athletes to participate in this
study (61% female; 85% Anglophone; 15% Francophone; Xage =30.56 years,
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SD =5.88 years). These high-performance athletes were associated with the
Athlete Assistance Program (AAP), a Canadian funding program under Sport
Canada which financially supports athletes with potential to achieve top 16 results
at international sporting. In our sample, 86.1% reported having competed in an
Olympic sport, 9.5% reported having competed in a Paralympic sport, and 4.4%
reported having competed in a non-Olympic sport. At their highest level of
competition, 65.6% of the sample reported having been carded by the AAP
with the “Senior International Card”(the highest level of funding for athletes
expected to compete at an Olympic, Paralympic or international championship),
16.6% with the “Senior National Card”(for athletes expected to compete at
a national level), and finally, 17.8% were carded with the “Development Card”
(for athletes training to compete on a national level). Athletes reported having
competed in their sport prior to retirement for an average of 15.58 years (SD =
6.08 years). The first survey of this study was administered in 2014. As only a small
handful of elite athletes retire in a given year, and most retire following Olympic
Games, we recruited athletes that had retired between 2008 and 2014 allowing us to
capture retirees following two summer and two winter Olympic Games. The
majority of the sample (58%) retired between 2012 and 2014. On average, athletes
reported having retired 2.55 years (SD =1.64) before participating in our study.
Athletes were also asked if they agreed to be contacted for a follow-up study which
was sent to 150 participants (94.9% of the original sample) 1.5 years after the initial
survey. Of this sub-sample, 63% (N=94) participated in the second part of
the study.
Procedure
Through collaboration with the Canadian Sport Institute’s Elite Athlete Transition
Program (EATP), we contacted retired athletes via email. The email provided
the prospective participants with information about the study, and allowed
participants to access an online link where they were presented with a consent
form. This study was approved by the University ethics board (REB file #332-
0114), and participants gave written consent before participating. As recom-
mended by Vallerand (1989), a parallel back-translation procedure was used to
translate scales to French by two native Francophone speakers with academic
backgrounds in psychology. Preliminary analyses revealed no differences in the
means of the outcome variables as a function of the survey language. Participants
were compensated for their participation with $10 online gift cards for iTunes or
Amazon.
In total, four time points in athletes’lives were assessed; three time points in
the first survey and one time point in the follow-up survey. The four time points
represented the peak of athletes’career (T1), two months post-retirement (T2),
approximately two years following retirement (T3) and approximately 3.5 years
following retirement (T4). Because all athletes in our sample had already retired,
the T1 and T2 assessments were retrospective. We sought to minimize participants’
recall bias and enhance the validity of participants’retrospective information recall
by instructing participants to think back to their former selves and write a small
paragraph describing themselves and how they felt about the sport at each time
point, before answering survey questions related to that time point. This priming
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technique was also used in T3 in which participants were asked to write a short
paragraph describing themselves in the present.
General demographic information was assessed prior to the priming sections.
Athletes reported on their SWB at all four time points. At T1 athletes reported on
their motivation for sport engagement. At T2 participants were asked about their
specific reasons for retirement and their motivation for retirement. At T3 and T4
participants reported on disengagement from their former competitive sport and
reengagement with new pursuits.
Measures
Subjective well being (SWB). We employed the Mood Report (Emmons &
Diener, 1985) to assess the emotional component of SWB. For each item, participants
rated theextent to which they experienced a specific emotion on a 7-point Likert scale
ranging from “not at all”(1) to “extremely”(7). The scale consists of nine items, four
describing positive affect (e.g., joyful, happy) and five describing negative affect
(e.g., anxious, worried). The five-item Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS; Diener,
Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985) was employed to assess the cognitive component
of SWB. Participants rated the extent to which they agreed with statements regarding
how satisfied they felt about the current conditions in their life on a 7-point Likert
scale ranging from “not at all true”(1) to “very true”(7). A composite index of SWB
was calculated with the mean standardized scores of positive affect, reversed negative
affect, and satisfaction with life at all four time points.
Motivation for sport. At T1 participants completed a 10-item abbreviated version
of the Sport Motivation Scale (SMS) (Pelletier et al., 1995). While the SMS
differentiates between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, we sought to use these
items to distinguish between autonomous and controlled motivation. Participants
responded to the prompt “Why did you practise your sport?”. Participants rated
items on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from “does not correspond at all”(1) to
“corresponds exactly”(7). The abbreviated measure included six items measuring
autonomous motivation, and four items measuring controlled motivation. The
items measuring autonomous motivation included items that measured the three
subtypes of intrinsic motivation “to know”(e.g., “For the pleasure that I felt while
learning training techniques that I had never tried before.”), “to experience
stimulation”(e.g., “For the excitement I felt when I was involved in the activity.”)
and “to accomplish”(e.g., “For the satisfaction I experienced while I was
perfecting my abilities.”) as well as identified motivation (e.g., “Because it was
one of the best ways to maintain good relationships with my friends.”). We
calculated the mean of these six items to compute autonomous motivation for
sport. The four items measuring controlled motivation included three items that
measured external regulation (e.g., “For the prestige of being an athlete.”;“To
show others how good I was at my sport.”;“Because it allowed me to be well
regarded by people that I know.”) as well as introjected motivation (e.g., “Because
I would feel bad if I was not taking time to practise.”). Reliability was good with
Cronbach α’s of .76 for autonomous motivation and .73 for controlled motivation.
The goal adjustment scale. The Goal Adjustment Scale was adapted from
Wrosch et al. (2003) to capture athlete’s disengagement from goals related to
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their athletic careers and reengagement with new pursuits. Four statements
assessed athletes’disengagement from their athletic careers. Consistent with
Wrosch et al. (2003), two items were related to the “effort”component of goal
disengagement (e.g., “It’s easy for me to reduce my effort toward the goal of
becoming a professional athlete”), while two statements were related to the
“commitment”component of goal disengagement (e.g., “I stayed committed to
the goal of becoming a professional athlete for a long time; I can’t let it go”).
Participants rated items on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from “strongly disagree”
(1) to “strongly agree”(7). Successful goal reengagement was measured by six
statements reflecting initiation of alternative goal pursuit (e.g., “I seek other
meaningful goals”and “I tell myself that I have a number of other new goals
to draw on.”). This scale was administered at T3 and T4. Reliability was excellent
with Cronbach α’s of .84 for both disengagement and reengagement.
Motivation for retirement. Participants rated their motivation for retirement with
two slider scale questions, ranging from “0–notatall”,to“100 –completely”.The
first question assessed the degree to which the participant felt autonomous about their
decision to retire (“How much did you feel it was your own choice/desire to retire
from your sport?”). The second question assessed the degree to which the participant
felt controlled in their decision to retire (“How much did you feel pressured and
compelled to retire from your sport?”). These measures were significantly negatively
correlated with a Pearson correlation (r(136) =−.47, p<.001).
Reasons for retirement. We assessed athletes’reasons for retirement by asking
participants to select as many reasons as applied to their circumstance from a
15-item list supplied to us by the AAP. Six of these reasons reflected autonomous
reasons for retirement (e.g., “I wanted to pursue an alternative career”or
“I achieved my sport related goals”). The remaining nine reasons participants
could select from represented controlled reasons for retirement (e.g., “Injury”or
“I was not selected on the national team”).
Results
Analytic Strategy
All analyses were conducted using SPSS 23. We conducted some preliminary
correlational analyses to understand the association between athletes’reasons for
retirement and their motivation to retire. We hypothesized that reasons reflecting
athletes’choice, agency and interest would positively correlate to autonomous
motivation for retirement, whereas reasons reflecting pressure and conflict would
positively correlate with controlled motivation for retirement. We also describe the
correlations between the key variables of the study. Next, we conducted some
preliminary analyses with the aim of informing the reader about the evolution of
the key variables (SWB, disengagement, reengagement) throughout the study, via
a repeated-measures within-subjects ANOVA and paired samples t-tests. For our
main research questions, namely (1) the extent to which motivational factors
impacted athletes’disengagement progress, and (2) the extent to which motiva-
tional factors and disengagement progress impacted athletes’SWB, we used
hierarchal multiple regression analyses.
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Preliminary Analyses
Association of reasons for retirement with retirement motivation. From the
15 available items to choose from, athletes selected between 1 and 10 reasons for
retirement (M=3.68, SD =1.79). In line with our expectations, our measure of
autonomous motivation for retirement was positively correlated, using Pearson’s
correlation, with items reflecting athletes’choice, agency and interest, such as
“wanting to pursue an alternative career”(r(154) =.34, p<.001), “achieving
athletic career objectives”(r(154) =.34, p<.001), “no longer being interested
in competing”(r(154) =.33, p<.001), and “wanting to pursue education”(r(154)
=.21, p=.009), while autonomous motivation was negatively associated with
items such as “not being selected for the national team”(r(154) =−.23, p=.004)
and “injury”(r(154) =−.36, p<.001). Conversely, our measure of controlled
motivation for retirement was positively correlated with items reflecting conflict
and tension such as “difficulties with my coach/staff”(r(139) =.31, p<.001) and
“experiencing discrimination”(r(139) =.21, p=.015), while being negatively
associated with more autonomous reasons such as “no longer being interested
in competing”(r(139) =−.31, p<.001) and “achieving athletic career objectives”
(r(139) =−.17, p=.046).
Associations between key variables. Table 1depicts the correlations between
athletes’motivation for sport engagement, motivation for retirement, and athletes’
disengagement progress over time. Athletes’autonomous motivation for sport
engagement and athletes’autonomous motivation for retirement were both positively
related to T3 disengagement progress. Conversely, athletes’controlled motivation
for sport engagement and controlled motivation for retirement were both negatively
related to T3 disengagement progress. Importantly, neither autonomous nor con-
trolled motivation for sport engagement was associated with autonomous or
controlled motivation for retirement. Table 1also shows that autonomous motivation
for retirement was positively associated with SWB at T2 and T3, indicating that
athletes who felt more autonomous in their motivation for retiring tended to report
higher SWB in retirement.
Changes in key variables over time. These analyses are included to orient the
reader to the trajectories of athletes’SWB, disengagement, and reengagement
progress over the course of their retirement. Using paired samples t-tests we
analyzed the change in athletes’disengagement and reengagement progress from
T3 to T4. Over the 1.5-year follow-up (T4), athletes continued to make disengage-
ment progress (M=5.45, SD =1.39) (t(1, 91) =−4.20, p<.001). However,
athletes did not differ significantly in their T3 reengagement progress, (M=5.87,
SD =0.97) versus their T4 reengagement progress (M=5.92, SD =0.82) which
was judged to be at a high level at T3. A repeated measures ANOVA was
conducted to examine how athletes’SWB fluctuated throughout retirement, with
time period used as a within-subjects factor with four levels (T1, T2, T3, and T4).
We conducted Mauchly’s Test of Sphericity and found that the assumption of
sphericity had been violated X
2
(5) =29.89, p<.001, which is common in repeated
measures designs (O’Brien & Kaiser, 1985). Since the violation of sphericity
increases the risk of a Type I error, we applied a Greenhouse-Geisser correction in
our analysis. A repeated measures ANOVA with a Greenhouse-Geisser correction
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determined that SWB differed significantly between the four time-points F(2.48,
227.96) =24.76, p<.001. Post-hoc tests using the Bonferroni correction revealed
that athletes generally reported high levels of SWB at the peak of their athletic
careers (T1) followed by a significant decrease 2 months post-retirement (T2)
(M=5.60, SD =.10 vs. M=4.47, SD =.16, respectively). This decrease in SWB
was recovered at the later stages athletes of retirement (T3) (M=5.37, SD =.12)
and (T4) (M=5.20, SD =.11).
Main Results
Motivational factors influencing disengagement from athletic career. To
answer our first question regarding the motivational factors implicated in athletic
career disengagement we examined athletes’autonomous and controlled motivation
for sport engagement at their career-peak, as well as their autonomous and controlled
motivation for retirement, to predict disengagement progress approximately 2 years
after retirement (T3). We conducted a two-step hierarchical regression entering
athletes’autonomous and controlled motivation for sport engagement in the first step
Table 1 Means, Standard Deviations and Correlations Between the
Major Study Variables
¯x
s1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10
1. T1 autonomous
sport motivation
5.88
(.97)
X
2. T1 controlled
sport motivation
4.51
(1.27)
.26** X
3. T2 autonomous
motivation for
retirement
71.68
(32.58)
.01 −.09 X
4. T2 controlled
motivation for
retirement
36.62
(35.05)
−.11 .02 −.47** X
5. T3
Disengagement
4.70
(1.51)
.16* −.20* .36** −.22** X
6. T4
Disengagement
5.45
(1.40)
−.05 −.06 .26* .09 .33** X
7. T1 SWB 5.82
(.92)
.23** .13 .04 −.16 −.06 −.10 X
8. T2 SWB 4.46
(1.45)
.16 .04 .57** −.44** .34** .16 .13 X
9. T3 SWB 5.31
(1.20)
.24* −.03 .24* −.15 .29** .08 .22** .36** X
10. T4 SWB 5.21
(1.05)
.24* −.05 .15 −.06 .21** .27** .37** .25* .55** X
*Correlation significant at p<.05, **Correlation significant at p<.01.
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98 Holding et al.
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and athletes’autonomous and controlled motivation for retirement in the second
step. At the first step, athletes’autonomous motivation for sport engagement was
associated with increased disengagement progress (β=.24, t=2.77, p=.006)
whereas controlled motivation was associated with decreased disengagement
progress (β=−.22, t=−2.52, p=.013). This step accounted for 8% of the variance
in T3 disengagement progress (F(2, 130) =5.66, p=.004). At the second step,
athletes’autonomous motivation for retirement also emerged as a significant
predictor of disengagement progress (β=.25, t=2.73, p=.007) while controlled
motivation for retirement was non-significant (β=−.06, t=−.67, p=.51), predicting
an additional 8% of the variance in disengagement progress (F(4, 128) =6.06,
p<.001). In total, this model accounted for 16% of the variance in athletes’
disengagement progress at T3. We then repeated the same analysis with T4
disengagement progress entered as the dependent variable. Approximately 3.5 years
post-retirement, only autonomous motivation for retirement was associated with
increased disengagement progress (β=.37, t=3.28, p=.002), accounting for 12.4%
of the variance in T4 disengagement progress (F(4, 75) =2.65, p=.04).
Psychological processes and SWB over time. After establishing that autono-
mous motivation for retirement predicted the largest variance in athletes’dis-
engagement progress, we next sought to examine the effects of motivation for
retirement and disengagement progress on athletes’SWB. Because motivation for
retirement and disengagement progress were both related to SWB we conducted
a hierarchical regression to predict athletes SWB approximately 2 years post-
retirement (T3). We entered athletes’baseline SWB and years since retirement in
the first step of the regression to control for participant differences in baseline well-
being as well as differences in the latency between participants’retirement and
survey completion. We entered autonomous motivation for retirement in the second
step of the regression, and athletes T3 disengagement progress at the third step of the
regression. At the first step, athletes’time since retirement (β=.18, t=2.26, p=.02)
and baseline SWB (β=.20, t=2.51, p=.01) were both significant predictors of
T3 SWB accounting for 7.7% of the variance (F(2, 142) =5.92, p=.003). At the
second step of the regression, athletes’autonomous motivation for retirement also
predicted T3 SWB (β=.23, t=2.79, p=.006) explaining an additional 4.8% of the
variance in athletes’SWB (F(3, 141) =6.73, p=.006). Finally, at the third step,
athletes’T3 disengagement progress was entered in the regression (β=.23,
t=2.76, p=.006), predicting an additional 4.5% of the variance in athletes’SWB
(F(4, 140) =7.19, p=.006). In total, this model accounted for 17% of the variance
in athletes’SWB. As such, these findings suggest that autonomous motivation for
retirement and disengagement progress are both important factors in determining
athletes’post-retirement well-being. The same analysis was conducted with T4
SWB as the dependent variable. Only baseline SWB (β=.37, t=3.67, p<.001) and
athletes’T3 disengagement progress (β=.24, t=2.29, p=.024) significantly
accounted for athletes’well-being approximately 3.5 years post-retirement.
Discussion
The primary objectives of the present study were (1) to conceptualize the transition
into athletic retirement as a form of disengagement, (2) introduce SDT motivation
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factors as important predictors for successful disengagement from a terminated
athletic career, (3) examine how autonomous motivation for retirement and
disengagement progress impacted athletes’SWB in retirement.
As expected, athletes’SWB fluctuated as a function of their retirement stage:
while SWB decreased following retirement, athletes recovered in their SWB close
to baseline levels approximately 2 and 3.5 years following retirement. Over this
time period athletes continued to disengage from their terminated athletic career as
evidenced by the samples’increased average disengagement levels at the 3.5-year
follow-up. Consistent with the disengagement literature, athletes’disengagement
progress was positively associated with their SWB at all retirement measurement
points. As such, the disengagement process unfolded over several years, highlight-
ing the positive impact of disengagement on well-being, as well as difficulty of
relinquishing psychological commitment from a powerful career and role. Con-
versely, we found no differences in mean athlete reengagement in our follow-up
survey, suggesting that athletes’reengagement efforts had already plateaued at
the time of the first survey administration. This finding was not surprising given
the information we obtained about the “reengagement support”athletes receive
through Sport Canada’s transition program (EATP). At the time our study was
conducted, the Canadian EATP had devoted considerable resources towards
helping athletes plan their future by ensuring that retired athletes had goals and
career plans following retirement. One speculative explanation for the high
reengagement scores may be that our sample was well-prepared by the EATP
for this component of retirement, although we do not have data to support this
claim. Nevertheless, preparing athletes to psychologically disengage from their
former athletic career was not part of Sport Canada’s transition program, and is
currently not a component of any athlete transition program to the authors’best
knowledge. This has important implications for sport transition programs. Clin-
icians may be focusing heavily on helping athletes reengage with new goals and
careers post-retirement without sufficiently guiding athletes towards psychological
disengagement from their former athletic pursuits. We address the possibility of
including disengagement interventions in athlete transition programs later in the
discussion section.
The results of this study uncovered two factors facilitating disengagement:
athletes’autonomous sport motivation at their career peak and athletes’autonomous
motives for retirement. Firstly, we found that athletes who felt more autonomous
about engaging with their sport at their career peak tended to experience greater
disengagement progress in retirement, while athletes who felt controlled about
engaging with their sport at their career peak tended to have more difficulty
disengaging. No study to date as examined the effect of motivation for sport
engagement on disengagement progress in retirement. The most conceptually
similar work that has been conducted would suggest that autonomous motivation
for goal engagement can negatively impact the ease of goal disengagement
(e.g., Smith & Ntoumanis, 2014;Ntoumanis et al., 2014). However, both the scope
of the goals examined (e.g., imagining unattainability of season length goal;
8-minute cycling goal on ergometer) as well as the samples studied (e.g., student
athletes training for approximately three hours per week) are too dissimilar to elite
athletic career termination to draw generalizable conclusions. Furthermore, athletic
career termination is a decision with identity-relevant implications likely prompting
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considerable reflection and exploration in athletes, which highlights another impor-
tant distinction between our study and the previous studies. One interpretation may
be the self-concordant, integrated motivation athletes experienced at their career
peak helped athletes regulate disengagement with greater ease, flexibility, and
openness, once confronted with the reality of retirement. Conversely, athletes who
felt controlled about their sport at their career peak demonstrated less disengagement
progress in retirement. As Sheldon (2014, p. 355) wrote: “. . . pursuing non-
concordant [i.e., non-autonomous] goals is risky; people are more likely to give
up or fail to achieve such goals, and when they do achieve the goals, they may fail to
benefitfromsuchachievement”. In our sample, the athletes who felt predominately
controlled about sport engagement at their career peak may still be grappling with
the same controlling forces of external rewards, social approval or feelings of guilt/
pressure in retirement. In other words, athletes who used their competitive sporting
career as a vehicle to seek external approval or appease internal ego demands may
continue to feel subjugated to these demands even when the time-frame to pursue an
athletic career has elapsed, leading to poorer disengagement outcomes. Future
prospective longitudinal studies surveying athletes prior to retirement are needed to
replicate this finding and tease apart the mechanisms at play.
A second factor facilitating athletes’disengagement was their autonomous
motivation for retirement. While previous research has highlighted theimportance of
voluntariness in athletes’retirement decision when predicting the quality of the
career transition (for a review see Park et al., 2013), the present study considered
athletes’motives for retirement under the theoretical framework of OIT by distin-
guishing between autonomous and controlled reasons for retirement. As expected,
athletes who felt greater autonomous motivation about retirement tended to make
more disengagement progress approximately two years following retirement.
Clinical Implications for Sport Transition Programs
Results of our study suggest that disengagement progress had important implica-
tions for athletes’well-being in retirement. Importantly, this study assessed two
novel predictors, athletes’autonomous motivation for retirement and athletes’
disengagement progress, in determining athletes’SWB post-retirement. Our results
showed that autonomous motivation for retirement and disengagement from the
terminated career were both associated with elite athletes’increased well-being
approximately two years post-retirement. This finding has the potential to enhance
athlete transition and support programs that aim to maximize athlete SWB post-
retirement. By assessing athletes’motivation for retirement, transition programs are
likely to identify athletes that experience few autonomous reasons for retirement
and/or predominantly controlled reasons for retirement. Once identified, these
athletes may benefit from autonomy enhancing interventions designed to help
athletes internalise their motivation for retirement. These interventions could, for
example, validate athletes’emotional responses about retirement, explore athletes’
attitudes about retirement, and help athletes generate autonomous reasons for why
retirement may be in their best interest or congruent with other life values.
Importantly, results from this study suggest that holding autonomous motives
for retirement will facilitate athletes’disengagement from their terminated athletic
career. Autonomy enhancing interventions have proven successful in other domains
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of lifestyle disengagement, such as smoking cessation (Williams et al., 2006).
Indeed, in a smoking cessation study by Williams et al. (2006), counselors of the
intervention group focused understanding quitters’perspectives and emotional
responses about quitting smoking, as well as exploring quitters’attitudes about why
they liked smoking. Follow-up visits for those who had not wanted to quit smoking
involved counselors’reviewing the participants’values and initiating a discussion
about any further thoughts on trying to quit (Williams et al., 2006). Athletes nearing
retirement might also benefit from psychoeducation about the importance of
psychological disengagement and work collaboratively with sport psychologists
to identify strategies that will help them “let go”. Such strategies may include
avoiding self-blame and attributing perceived negative outcomes to causes outside
the self (Wrosch, Bauer, Miller, & Lupien, 2007).
Theoretical Implications
Finally, the research presented in this study may have implications for predicting
successful disengagement outside of the domain of athletic retirement. Thus far,
researchers in the field of lifespan motivation have largely considered individual
difference measures as predictors of goal disengagement (Heckhausen & Wrosch,
2016). For example, individuals’goal disengagement capacity, which refers to
individuals’general tendencies to withdraw effort and commitment from the
pursuit of unattainable goals across different domains, has been robustly linked to
increased disengagement progress (Wrosch et al., 2013). This study is the first to
suggest that individuals’disengagement progress may also be impacted by both
their motivation for engagement, as well as their motivation for disengagement.
As such, it may be important for the field to look beyond broad individual
difference measures when predicting disengagement progress, and to start consid-
ering motivational factors that are specific to the goal or network of goals that the
individual intends to disengage from.
Limitations and Future Directions
Despite the contribution of the present research to our understanding of athletes’
disengagement from a terminated athletic career, it is important to underscore the
limitations of this study. While we used longitudinal data to follow-up retired elite
athletes 1.5 years after their initial participation, a major limitation of this study was
the use of retrospective data for the first two time points of the study. While our
sample of 158 elite retired athletes represents a major strength of this paper,
studying this population with a fully prospective longitudinal design was not
feasible for the scope of this project. We sought to minimize participants’memory
bias and enhance the validity of retrospective information recall by priming
athletes with writing exercises prior to the completion of questionnaires targeting
distinct phases of their transition. However, the design issues of our study limit the
interpretability of our results. For example, due to the concurrent measurement of
motivation to retire and disengagement progress, we cannot exclude the possibility
that athletes further along in the disengagement process reconstructed their
retirement experience in a way that allowed them to perceive greater retrospective
autonomy in their retirement decision. In fact, an additional benefit of successful
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102 Holding et al.
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disengagement may be the enhanced perception of personal volition and integra-
tion when looking back on important life decisions, which is an interesting research
question unto itself. Nonetheless, the cross-sectional nature of the first three
measurement points weakens claims of directionality and may have biased
participant responding. The short-comings of our study design also limited our
analytical decisions, as more sophisticated analyses, such as mediation analyses,
are not warranted on cross-sectional data (Cole & Maxwell, 2003;Maxwell &
Cole, 2007). Clearly, future studies are needed to replicate the present findings with
fully prospective longitudinal data that assesses elite athletes prior to retirement as
well as experimental data that can fully address the directionality of effects.
Our longitudinal follow-up data demonstrated that athletes continued to
disengage over the 1.5-year follow-up period, and that athletes’disengagement
progress was still positively related to their SWB at this later time. None the less,
the effects of our second regression model of autonomous motivation for retire-
ment predicting SWB was no longer significant when T4 SWB was entered as the
dependent variable. It may be that our T4 follow-up sample was too small to
capture the effects of motivation to retire on SWB approximately 3.5 years since
athletes retired. The reliance on self-report measures in this study represents a
further limitation, even though the use of self-reports is consistent with prior
disengagement and motivation research (e.g., Sheldon & Elliot, 1998;Wrosch
et al., 2003).
While the present study focused on the application of OIT as a framework
for understanding the motivation underlying athletic career termination, Basic
Psychological Needs Theory (BPNT) is another important SDT mini-theory of
relevance for understanding athletes’retirement decision and outcomes. BPNT
highlights how the needs of competence, relatedness, and autonomy are central
to human wellness, development, and thriving (Ryan & Deci, 2017). The need
for autonomy is about experiencing choice and volition in one’s behavior and
endorsing actions as consistent with one’s interests, values, or beliefs. The need
for competence refers to feelings of effectiveness and mastery in one’s environ-
ment, and the need for relatedness involves feeling close and meaningfully
connected the people in one’s environment (Ryan & Deci, 2017). In sport research,
numerous studies have linked basic needs satisfaction with indicators of adaptive
functioning, such as increased well-being (Gagné, Ryan, & Bargmann, 2003),
persistence (Sarrazin, Vallerand, Guillet, Pelletier, & Cury, 2002), and protection
from burnout experiences (Perreault, Gaudreau, Lapointe, & Lacroix, 2007).
Meanwhile psychological need thwarting in sport is more pernicious than the
absence of need satisfaction (Gunnell, Crocker, Wilson, Mack, & Zumbo, 2013),
and is associated with a host of maladaptive outcomes (i.e., disordered eating,
depression, negative affect and physical symptoms, for a review see Bartholomew,
Ntoumanis, & Thøgersen-Ntoumani, 2011). Future research would benefit from
including assessments of psychological need satisfaction and thwarting prior and
subsequent to retirement. Not only would psychological need satisfaction be an
excellent outcome measure to capture athletes’post-retirement adaptation, but
measuring need satisfaction (and thwarting) would also allow researchers to
understand the relationship between psychological need satisfaction during their
career and how that impacted athletes’motivation to retire, their disengagement
progress, and post-career goal reengagement. In turn, it is likely that athletes’
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disengagement and reengagement may enhancing feelings of autonomy, compe-
tence and relatedness (see Sheldon & Elliott, 1999 for how goal attainment
increases need satisfaction). Assessing basic psychological needs would also fit
with the recently developed holistic ecological perspective in athletic career
research, which emphasizes the “athletic career as a social affair”(Henriksen,
Larsen, & Christensen, 2014) and shifts the researchers’focus from an individual
athlete to the environment the athlete belongs to. As such, understanding the
dynamic interplay between athletes’need satisfaction/thwarting and their motiva-
tion for retirement, disengagement, and reengagement, will add value to future
clinical interventions and build theoretical bridges between OIT, BPNT, and goal
adjustment theory.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this paper explored novel motivational antecedents of disengage-
ment from a terminated athletic career grounded in SDT. This study highlights the
need for transition and support programs to balance the predominant focus on
“what’s next”(reengagement) and take more time to process “what was there”
(motivation for sport engagement and retirement). While these findings require
replication with an improved study design, they have the potential to make
important applied contributions athlete transition programs as well as furthering
the field of disengagement research.
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