ABSTRACT
Vince Lombardi, American Football coach, NFL Hall of Fame Member (Lombardi, 2003, p. 105)
Introduction
Whether listening to athletes explaining their achievements, employees describing their reasons for staying with an organization, or people discussing the longevity of their romantic relationship, we commonly hear individuals talk of their “commitment” to the activity, entity, or person in question. Due in part to the frequency with which we encounter this concept in daily life, sustained empirical attention has been directed toward understanding the nature, origins, and implications of “commitment”. Indeed, within social (see Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005; Johnson, 1991; Rusbult, Martz, & Agnew, 1998), organizational (see Meyer, 2009; Meyer & Maltin, 2010), educational (see Jenkins, 1995), and athletic (see Weiss & Amorose, 2008) contexts, individuals’ persistence, wellbeing, and performance have all been examined through a “commitment” lens. In this chapter, we review the way in which commitment has traditionally been operationalized in sport and exercise, before outlining how our knowledge of commitment might be informed and advanced by drawing from established frameworks within organizational and social psychology.
