ASSERTIVE BEHAVIOR PROFILE IN PERFORMANCE SPORTS

As a fundamental part of personality, behavior represents the modality of acting and reacting in certain circumstances or situations. Specialty literature describes three types of behavior: aggressive, assertive and nonassertive ones. The purpose of this paper is to construct the assertive behavior profile in performance sports, but also to highlight the behavioral differences, depending on the type of sport practiced by the subjects of our study (individual sports, team sports and combat sports). In order to achieve our purpose, we used the Assertive Behavior Inventory Tool (ABIT), which includes 33 items. Concerning the assertive behavior, the results of our research emphasize that the highest mean of this behavioral type belongs to the athletes who practice combat sports (M 33.10 +/- sd 5.6), followed by the athletes who practice team sports(M +/- 32.71 sd 4.2) and by those who practice individual sports(M 31.95 +/- sd 5.9). As to the nonathletes, the mean of their assertive behavior is 32.24 (+/- sd 3.9). To conclude, the behavior of athletes who practice combat sports is not antisocially oriented, but the more it is aggressive, the higher their performance.