The Relationships among Proactive Personality, Work Engagement, and Perceived Work Competence in Sports Coaches: The Moderating Role of Perceived Supervisor Support.

Grounded in the job demands-resources model, this study examines the moderating role of supervisor support and the mediating role of sports coaches' work engagement in the relationship between proactive personality and perceived work competence. A total of 261 school sports coaches in Taiwan participated in the study. The results indicated that work engagement positively mediates the relationship between sports coaches' proactive personality and perceived work competence. Separately, supervisor support weakens the link between proactive personality and work engagement but strengthens the relationship between work engagement and perceived work competence; however, taken together, supervisor support weakens the indirect effects of proactive personality on perceived work competence through job engagement. Under the boundary condition of perceived supervisor support, the sports coaches' proactive personality is a critical antecedent of perceived work competence through work engagement. We suggest that proactive sports coaches are assets for schools because they possess the drive and energy for self-improvement, promoting organizational progress automatically.

Why employees with higher challenging appraisals style are more affectively engaged at work? The role of challenging stressors: a moderated mediation model.

Challenging stressors have been positively linked to various work outcomes. However, the role of individual differences in stress appraisal in shaping the function of challenging stressors and work outcomes has been rarely discussed. Drawing on the individual differences perspective, the authors propose that employees higher in challenge appraisal are more likely to have challenging stressors and are more responsive to such stressors to have a higher positive affect at work. Results obtained from 117 employees supported the hypotheses. The results indicated that challenge appraisal is positively related to challenging stressors. In addition, challenging stressors has a positive association with positive affect at work when challenge appraisal is high but has a null association when challenge appraisal is low. The findings suggest that challenging stressors does not necessarily bring positive work outcomes as suggested in past studies and highlight the importance of considering dispositional tendency in stress appraisal when looking into the function of challenging stressors and work outcomes.

Sports spectator behavior: a test of the theory of planned behavior.

The theory of planned behavior has been applied to sports and exercise behaviors. According to this theory, human intention to take action in a specific context is guided by three antecedents: attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control. Behavioral intention mediates the relationships between these three considerations and its ultimate performance. However, this theory has seldom been applied to the behaviors of spectators of sporting events. A sample of 269 volleyball spectators in Taiwan was studied to examine whether people's intention mediated their attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control toward a given behavior, watching the 2010 Fédération Internationale de Volleyball World Grand Prix in Taipei. Regression analyses did not support behavioral intention as a mediator. This result is discussed in the context of planned behavior.