Elite athletes operate under chronic exposure to high-intensity training, competitive pressure, public evaluation, and uncertainty about career development. Under these conditions, performance is shaped not only by physical fitness, technical-tactical competence, and training load, but also by psychological resources that help athletes maintain goal orientation, recover from setbacks, and sustain engagement under stress. Psychological capital theory, developed by Luthans and colleagues in 2007, treats hope, optimism, resilience, and self-efficacy as interconnected positive resources rather than isolated traits. Hope reflects sustained motivational orientation toward goals and belief that pathways to goal attainment can be identified; optimism involves interpreting difficulties as temporary and surmountable; resilience supports psychological recovery after mistakes, injuries, or competition failure; and self-efficacy underpins confidence in one’s capability to accomplish competitive tasks. Previous research had established stable correlations between psychological variables and sport performance, but the authors argue that the mechanisms converting psychological capital into performance among elite athletes remained underexamined, with most prior work focusing on burnout, stress, or career development rather than performance itself.

The study recruited active athletes from provincial-level and above professional sports teams across Henan, Shandong, Jilin, Shaanxi, and Hebei provinces using non-probability sampling, with participation voluntary and approved by the Ethics Committee of Henan Normal University (Approval No. HNSD-2025-15-11). Of 440 questionnaires distributed, 425 were returned, a response rate of 96.5 percent, and 410 were deemed valid, a valid response rate of 96.47 percent. The final sample comprised 224 males (54.6 percent) and 186 females (45.4 percent), aged 18.0 to 32.0 years with a mean age of 22.80 years (SD = 3.70). Participants had 6.0 to 15.0 years of training experience, with a mean of 9.20 years (SD = 2.60). By classification, 46 athletes (11.2 percent) competed at international level, 130 (31.7 percent) at national level, and 234 (57.1 percent) were first-class athletes. A total of 214 athletes (52.2 percent) participated in individual sports and 196 (47.8 percent) in team sports. All had continuously participated in official provincial-level or higher competitions during the previous two years.

Measurement relied on four established Chinese-language instruments. Psychological capital was assessed with the 26-item Positive Psychological Capital Questionnaire, rated on a 7-point Likert scale and covering self-efficacy, resilience, hope, and optimism; the authors moderately contextualized several general item expressions to training and competition settings while preserving the original dimensions and scoring. Sport self-efficacy was measured with a 15-item scale developed by Wei and colleagues in 2008, distinguishing training efficacy and competition efficacy. Sport self-handicapping was assessed with a 10-item scale revised by Sun and Zhang in 2008, higher scores indicating stronger defensive tendencies. Sport performance was measured with a 28-item self-report scale adapted from Rees and colleagues (2000) into Chinese by Tang (2020), spanning seven dimensions: plan execution, loss of composure, determination, worry, fatigue, flow, and effective tactics. Internal consistency was strong in the present sample, with Cronbach’s α coefficients of 0.863 for psychological capital, 0.992 for sport self-efficacy, 0.871 for sport self-handicapping, and 0.949 for sport performance, and confirmatory factor analysis indicated good structural validity for each instrument.

Crucially, the performance measure captured athletes’ subjective perceptions of their competitive state and performance quality rather than objective competition outcomes such as rankings, results, win-loss records, or technical statistics. The authors state explicitly that the findings support associations with perceived sport performance and should not be directly interpreted as evidence that psychological capital inevitably improves objective competition outcomes, since athletes with higher psychological capital may also evaluate their competitive status more favorably. Data were collected through an on-site questionnaire survey totaling 79 scale items, completed independently by athletes under standardized instructions, with trained psychology graduate students supervising collection. Coaches and team managers were not involved in questionnaire completion, and no monetary or material incentives were provided. Harman’s single-factor test for common method bias showed nine factors with eigenvalues greater than 1, with the first common factor explaining 32.236 percent of variance, below the 40 percent criterion, although the authors caution that this preliminary test cannot completely rule out shared-method interference in cross-sectional questionnaire data.

Pearson correlation analysis revealed a coherent pattern of associations among the four variables, all significant at p < 0.01. Psychological capital was positively associated with sport self-efficacy (r = 0.495) and with sport performance (r = 0.595), and negatively associated with sport self-handicapping (r = −0.529). Sport self-efficacy was positively associated with sport performance (r = 0.602) and negatively associated with sport self-handicapping (r = −0.496). Sport self-handicapping showed the strongest negative association with sport performance of any pair (r = −0.637). Regression analyses controlling for sex and age as covariates then examined each component path. Psychological capital significantly positively predicted sport performance (β = 0.592, t = 14.847, p < 0.001), with the model explaining 35.8 percent of variance and a large local effect size (f² = 0.543). Psychological capital also significantly positively predicted sport self-efficacy (β = 0.491, p < 0.001, R² = 0.248, f² = 0.319), and significantly negatively predicted sport self-handicapping (β = −0.376, p < 0.001), while sport self-efficacy independently negatively predicted self-handicapping (β = −0.314, p < 0.001).

When all three psychological variables were entered simultaneously, the full model explained 56.1 percent of the variance in sport performance (R² = 0.561, F = 103.309, p < 0.001). Psychological capital retained a significant positive coefficient (β = 0.260, p < 0.001, f² = 0.100), sport self-efficacy a significant positive coefficient (β = 0.294, p < 0.001, f² = 0.133), and sport self-handicapping a significant negative coefficient (β = −0.353, p < 0.001, f² = 0.182), the latter reaching a medium effect size. Multicollinearity diagnostics showed variance inflation factors ranging from 1.000 to 1.557 and tolerance values from 0.642 to 1.000, well within conservative reference criteria, indicating that the coefficients could be interpreted without serious collinearity problems. The persistence of a significant direct effect after accounting for both mediators indicated that sport self-efficacy and sport self-handicapping played partial rather than full mediating roles.

Chain mediation testing used PROCESS Model 6 with 5,000 bootstrap resamples, generating 95 percent confidence intervals for each indirect effect and treating effects as significant when intervals excluded zero. The total effect of psychological capital on sport performance was 0.4035 (95% CI [0.3467, 0.4589]). After including both mediators, the direct effect remained significant at 0.1777 (95% CI [0.1145, 0.2399]), and the total indirect effect was 0.2259 (95% CI [0.1846, 0.2720]). The specific indirect path through sport self-efficacy alone was 0.0984 (95% CI [0.0696, 0.1311]), accounting for 24.4 percent of the total effect. The path through reduced sport self-handicapping alone was 0.0904 (95% CI [0.0614, 0.1245]), accounting for 22.4 percent. The sequential chain path — psychological capital to higher sport self-efficacy to lower sport self-handicapping to better sport performance — was 0.0371 (95% CI [0.0224, 0.0550]), accounting for 9.2 percent of the total effect. All three hypotheses concerning mediation, and the fourth concerning chain mediation, were supported by the data.

Theoretically, the chain mechanism suggests that comprehensive positive psychological resources must first be transformed into situational capability beliefs — judgments that one can complete current training and competition tasks — before influencing subsequent defensive behavior. Sport self-efficacy is related to, but not identical to, the self-efficacy dimension of psychological capital: the former is a task-specific belief oriented toward current competitive demands, whereas the latter is a comprehensive upstream resource. Higher sport self-efficacy was associated with a lower likelihood of adopting self-handicapping strategies such as defensive attribution, reduced effort investment, and avoidance of challenges. Self-handicapping, conceptualized as a self-protection strategy in response to potential failure threats, may reduce psychological threat in the short term but, over time, weakens genuine effort, disrupts authentic feedback, and hinders effective reflection on the causes of failure. For elite athletes, whose competition outcomes are highly public and carry significant evaluative consequences, the authors argue this defensive tendency is particularly likely to be activated under pressure.

The authors frame the findings within the specific context of Chinese professional competitive sport, noting that collective goals, coach authority, interpersonal norms, and social evaluation may influence athletes’ capability judgments and coping styles; because no cross-cultural comparison was conducted, they caution that the pathway cannot be assumed to operate identically across different cultural groups. Several limitations constrain interpretation. The cross-sectional design cannot establish temporal order or causal relationships; the serial mediation findings indicate only that the data are consistent with the hypothesized indirect association structure. Non-probability sampling from five provinces means the sample should not be considered representative of all Chinese elite athletes. Self-reports collected at a single time point may be influenced by social desirability, and psychological capital, sport self-efficacy, and self-reported performance all involve positive self-evaluative attributes that may inflate shared variance, while self-handicapping may be underreported. Sport type was recorded descriptively but not included in the primary models, so sport-specific differences cannot be completely ruled out. Future work, the authors suggest, should combine official competition results, coach evaluations, and behavioral observations with multi-source and longitudinal designs, and examine how coach feedback, team norms, and organizational environments shape the sequence from psychological resources to capability beliefs, defensive strategies, and performance.

Subject of Research: Sport Psychology

Article Title: The association between psychological capital and sport performance in elite athletes: the chain mediating role of sport self-efficacy and sport self-handicapping

Article References: Zhang, D., Gao, W., Liu, L., Li, X., Li, H., Wang, H., & Hwang, J. (2026). The association between psychological capital and sport performance in elite athletes: the chain mediating role of sport self-efficacy and sport self-handicapping. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1883522. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1883522

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1883522

Keywords: association, between, psychological, capital, sport, performance, elite, athletes, chain, mediating, role, self-efficacy