Giving and receiving autonomy support in a high-stakes sport context: A field-based experiment during the 2012 London Paralympic Games

Recognizing that high-stakes competitions tend to pressure coaches toward a maladaptive controlling motivating style, we sought to evaluate the capacity of an intervention to help coaches adopt a more autonomy-supportive style as they and their athletes prepared for the 2012 London Paralympic Games. We adopted a coach-focused experimental research design that longitudinally assessed coaches' and athletes' self-report, rater-scored, and objective...