Compensatory motivation following unintentional group norm violations: evidence from professional soccer

Joachim Hüffmeier*, Thomas Schultze

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

Team members may have good reasons to intentionally violate central team norms (e.g., moral rebellion). While research has investigated those mechanisms, unintentional violations of team norms have not yet received similar attention. In this research, we focus on violations of the norm not to hurt the own team. We predicted that team members who unintentionally hurt this norm, are motivated to compensate for their transgression, and that this compensatory motivation is the stronger the more harm the own transgression did to the team. We focused our analysis on own goals (i.e., hitting the own instead of the opposing team’s goal) that soccer players scored in the first German Soccer League. We analyzed whether soccer players are more likely to score a regular goal following an own goal compared to both their regular goal scoring frequency and the frequency to score a regular goal after the opposing team scored a regular goal. We found that soccer players are more likely to score regular goals following own goals compared to both standards. The increase in goal frequency was the stronger the more harm the own goal did to the team. Unintentional team norm violations thus appear to be followed by strong compensatory motivation aimed at minimizing the harm inflicted on the team.

Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 09 Mar 2015
Externally publishedYes
Event57th Conference of Experimental Psychologists, TeaP 2015 - Hildesheim, Germany
Duration: 08 Mar 201511 Mar 2015
https://doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.876

Conference

Conference57th Conference of Experimental Psychologists, TeaP 2015
Abbreviated titleTeaP 2015
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityHildesheim
Period08/03/201511/03/2015
Internet address

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