Personality Characteristics in Individual and Team Sports

This study compares the personality characteristics of athletes in individual and team sports. 197 athletes (105 individual, 92 team, 131 males, and 66 females) completed the SPQ-20 Sport Personality Questionnaire. This questionnaire is composed of four sub- scales of 20 personality traits. The data were collected by Sport Personality Questionnaire 20 (SPQ-20) and the statistical analysis was performed with SPSS software. In order to describe the data, the description used to compare the average is the t-test. The results revealed that individual sport athletes scored significantly higher only on flow than team sport athletes. The team sport athletes scored significantly higher on conscientiousness, self-awareness, and ethics than what the individual sport athletes did. No significant difference was found between two groups on achievement, adaptability, competitiveness, visualization, intuition, goal setting, pressure management, self-efficacy, failure fear control, stress management, emotions, self-talk, empathy, relationships, aggressiveness, and impression management. It can be concluded that the personality characteristics of athletes are different between individual and team sports.