When hockey parents are motivationally imbalanced: Passion, need satisfaction, and verbal aggression toward officials

Spectators can engage in high levels of verbal aggression toward youth hockey officials. Often, the perpetrators of this aggression are the parents. Our aim was to test the motivational factors involved in explaining why hockey parents sometimes take things too far and engage in verbally aggressive behavior toward officials. We reasoned that verbal aggression toward officials would be a function of two forms of motivational imbalance. First, in line with the dualistic model of passion, we hypothesized that verbal aggression would be positively associated with hockey parents' obsessive passion, an imbalanced form of passion. Also, based on the compensatory model of passion, we predicted that obsessive passion would be associated with imbalanced psychological need satisfaction involving high need satisfaction from being a hockey parent, but low global need satisfaction. We administered online surveys to Canadian hockey parents (N = 992) assessing their verbal aggression toward officials, passion for being a hockey parent, and psychological need satisfaction from being a hockey parent and in general. Using structural equation modeling, we found support for a model in which high need satisfaction from being a hockey parent and low need satisfaction in general were associated with obsessive passion. Obsessive passion, in turn, was associated with greater verbal aggression toward referees. These findings help reveal why some hockey parents insult, threaten, and engage in other forms of verbal aggression toward officials. They also highlight the importance of maintaining motivational balance among sport parents.