Psychological safety and athlete engagement in team sports: a multilevel moderated mediation model of autonomous motivation, environmental feedback, and goal orientation

Sustaining athlete motivation and engagement remains an important challenge in competitive team sports. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory and Achievement Goal Theory, this study examines the association between team-level psychological safety and athlete engagement through autonomous motivation, while considering environmental feedback and mastery goal orientation as boundary conditions. A three-wave, time-lagged survey design was used to collect data from 512 athletes participating in basketball, football, volleyball, and handball in China. Athletes were nested within teams, and the proposed cross-level moderated mediation model was examined using multilevel structural equation modeling. Psychological safety was positively associated with autonomous motivation (β = 0.42, p < .001), and autonomous motivation was positively associated with athlete engagement (β = 0.48, p < .001). The indirect association between psychological safety and athlete engagement through autonomous motivation was significant (β = 0.20, 95% CI [0.134, 0.276]). Environmental feedback strengthened the association between psychological safety and autonomous motivation (β = 0.16, p < .001), whereas mastery goal orientation strengthened the association between autonomous motivation and athlete engagement (β = 0.14, p < .001). The conditional indirect association was strongest when both environmental feedback and mastery goal orientation were high. The findings indicate that autonomous motivation represents an important motivational pathway linking psychologically safe team environments with athlete engagement. They also suggest that this pathway varies according to both contextual feedback conditions and athletes’ mastery goal orientation. The study extends understanding of athlete engagement by integrating team-level and individual-level factors within a multilevel conditional-process framework.