International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

Article The Relationship between and Burnout in Athletes and the Mediating Role of Engagement

Mar Graña 1, Cristina De Francisco 2,* and Constantino Arce 1

1 Department of Social , Basic and Methodology, University of Santiago de Compostela, 15782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain; [email protected] (M.G.); [email protected] (C.A.) 2 Department of , University of Sevilla, 41018 Sevilla, Spain * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +34-881-811-000 (ext. 13795)

Abstract: The purpose of our research was to analyze the relationship among motivation, burnout, and engagement in . Five hundred athletes of both sexes from multiple sports modalities took part, with a mean age of 17.39 years (SD = 4.60). The instruments applied were as follows: Spanish versions of the Motivation Scale (SMS), the Athlete Engagement Questionnaire (AEQ) and the Athlete Burnout Questionnaire (ABQ). Pearson correlations showed that motivation is negatively related to burnout and positively to engagement, while burnout and engagement are inversely related to each other. Through structural equation modeling, it was shown that engagement has a mediating role between motivation and burnout. Furthermore, there are no gender differences in

 this relationship, although there are differences between athletes who practice individual sports and  those who practice collective sports. Encouraging high levels of self-determined motivation can help

Citation: Graña, M.; De Francisco, C.; to increase athletes’ degree of engagement and protect them against burnout and sport withdrawal. Arce, C. The Relationship between Motivation and Burnout in Athletes Keywords: motivation; burnout; engagement; athletes and the Mediating Role of Engagement. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18, 4884. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph 1. Introduction 18094884 The Self-Determination Theory (SDT) [1] within the context of sport [2–4] is a fun- damental theoretical framework for the in-depth study of sport burnout. This macro Academic Editors: Octavio Alvarez, framework, which analyses the extent to which human behavior may be volitional or Isabel Castillo, Pedro Saenz-Lopez self-determined, includes the sub-theory of organic integration. This sub-theory considers Buñuel and Inés Tomás motivation as a continuum whose poles are non-self-determined and self-determined behaviour, identifying three fundamental types of motivation: (a) amotivation, charac- Received: 28 March 2021 terized by a lack of motivation to engage in activity; (b) extrinsic motivation, defined Accepted: 28 April 2021 Published: 4 May 2021 as the motivation to engage driven by the consequences of the activity, given that it is not intrinsically reinforcing; and (c) intrinsic motivation, where the drive to engage is

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral motivated by the internal interest, satisfaction, and reward inherent to the activity itself. with regard to jurisdictional claims in In turn, extrinsic motivation can be divided into four types of motivation [1,5]: external published maps and institutional affil- regulation, introjected regulation, identified regulation, and integrated regulation, the latter iations. being the most self-determined form of extrinsic motivation. The results of studies based on the SDT in order to gain an insight into burnout in the sports context have shown that it is positively related to amotivation and negatively to intrinsic motivation [6]. The term “burnout” was first coined by German psychoanalyst Freudenberger [7]. The concept evolved through a series of major studies by authors Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. working in the field of