The Perceived Significance of Spirituality on Sri Lankan National Team Players’ Performance

The purpose of the present study was to analyze the relationship between spirituality and perceived performance in team sports players. A standard spirituality questionnaire was used to assess the exogenous variable. The endogenous variable of the study was perceived performance and was measured through a questionnaire of a likert scale which was adopted from literature. Subjective performances of the players were derived opposed to objective performance. Data had been collected from Sri Lankan national team players who are engaged in team sports of football, basketball, Elle, volleyball, Hockey, Kabaddi, Netball, Rugby and Throw ball. The study population was 308 national team players and the universal sampling technique was used. The study results reveal that there is a positive relationship between spirituality and performance of the players.


Introduction
Success of sports is widely measured through the performance of the players'. According to a brilliant basketball coach namely, John Woodman, "Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming". Nevertheless the power of a sports team, prestige and the wealth is decided upon the successive performance of a team.
The sports performance of Sri Lanka in international arena is recorded to be low (Perera and Pushpakumari, 2015a;Perera, 2018;2019). There are many factors affecting the player's sports performance (Perera, 2019) and there are factors which are controllable by the players while some are uncontrollable (De Bossche et al., 2006;Torkashvand et al., 2016). The dynamics which deal with the mental reasoning of the athletes are the psychological factors. These are the factors which involves with the conduct and the performance of the players. Scholars have found that psychological factors are the crucial facilitating factors in enhancing expertise but yet least prominence has been placed on such factors by the researchers (Abbott and Collins, 2002;Habibian et al., 2015). There are arrays of psychological facets affecting players' performance. Spirituality is one of the psychological factors, which is being least tapped in sports domain. Therefore the main intension of this study is to analyze the impact of spirituality on players' sports performance.

Literature Review
Studies conducted in relation to Sport science can measure many facets of human performance, nevertheless the spiritual dimensions with regard to sports experience cannot be entirely understood through such measurement (Parry et al., 2007). Yet, the spiritual experience of sport (described as flow Csikszentmihalyi (1975), transcendence or the discovery of meaning and value) is a fundamental factor for participation in sports, and to achieving victory (Parry et al., 2007).
Spirituality is merely a belief, which is embedded with individuals with their birth. Spirituality beliefs basically accompanied with family rituals. It is frequently flows through generation to generation. Sri Lanka is a multi-racial and multi-cultural country (Perera, 2019). The most prominent prevailing family structure in Sri Lanka is the extended family which is beyond the nuclear family and it includes grandparents and other relatives also. There is a huge impact from such families to the children on their spirituality beliefs. The culture persist in Sri Lanka is basically harmonized with religiosity. Sri Lankan Culture is nourished with facets of Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Catholic beliefs and Islam beliefs. Since all the religious groups lives together in Sri Lanka in many of the provinces, the beliefs and rituals of all religions are blended. Religiosity acts as the most influential factor for many of the decisions of the natives of Sri Lanka. Therefore, religiosity and spirituality are widely discussed as two sides of the same coin. Religion is defined as "a system of beliefs in divine or superhuman power, and practices of worship or other rituals directed toward such a power" (Argyle and Beit-Hallahmi, 1975) whereas spirituality is defined as "experiencing the presence of a power, a force and energy or god close to you Dillon and Tiat (2000). Spirituality can be defined through visualizing sanctification (Fernandez et al., 2016). Sanctification is the psychological method by which individuals recognize or dynamically interpret aspects of life as having a spiritual character or meaning (Pargament and Mahoney, 2005).
Sri Lankan coaches have to deal with players who hold extensively divergent values and beliefs about their sporting and everyday life (Biyanwila and Perera, 2018;Watson and Nesti, 2005). Elkins et al. (1988) stated that spirituality exists in all individuals and Watson and Nesti (2005), stated that significant number of athletes will have spiritual or religious beliefs. Yet, spirituality has received little emphasis in the sport psychology literature (Parry et al., 2007).
Literature on positive psychology (Aspinwall and Staudinger, 2003;Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) describes spirituality as having an important role in accelerating excellence in human activities and increasing wellbeing and health (Watson and Nesti, 2005). Thus, its being found that spirituality plays a vital role in enhancing sports performance (Dillon and Tiat, 2000;Watson and Nesti, 2005).
The endogenous variable of this research is the perceived performance of the players. There is empirical evidence regarding performance measurement mechanism: (a) objective performance, (b) subjective performance, and (c) a combination of both subjective and objective sports performance measures. Objective measures considered the actual performance scores which would be measured through win loss percentages, points accumulated in a medal table and many more (Perera and Pushpakumari, 2015a;2015c;2015b;Vella et al., 2013), shots taken in golf (Gaudreau and Blondin, 2004), batting average in baseball (Nicholls et al., 2016;Smith and Christensen, 1995), or performance time on a rowing test (Hatzigeorgiadis, 2006). Subjective assessments of performance is measured by considering the perception of the player on his/her performance, or the perception of the coaches and/or spectator's on performance of the athlete reporting the extent to which they are satisfied with the performance of the said player (Besharat and Pourbohlool, 2011;Perera, 2019). Few scholars utilized a combination of both objective and subjective assessments to indicate a measure of performance (Gaudreau and Blondin, 2004).
The present study considers subjective performance which involves athletes reporting the degree to which they are satisfied with their performance on a Likert-type scale.

Data Collection
Questionnaire was used to collect data from the players to measure the goal orientation and performance. Spirituality was measured through a questionnaire adopted from Dillon and Tiat (2000), while the measure for perceived performance of players was adopted from Lemmink et al. (2008). The questionnaire was pilot tested and received a Cronbach's alpha value of 0.82 and 0.93 respectively for spirituality and performance constructs, which is higher than the cutoff value suggested by Nunnally (1978).
Based on the theoretical substances and literature following hypothesis was derived and examined. Hypothesis 1 : There is a significant relationship between Spirituality and perceived performance of the players

Results and Discussion
The associations of spirituality and perceived performance of the players were analyzed using a Structural Equation Modeling procedure (SEM). Goodness of fit is the foremost output that can be extracted from the first phase of SEM data analysis. Comparative fit index (CFI), Chi-square statistics (CMIN), Tucker Lewis index (TLI), Root Mean Square error of Approximation (RMSEA), were examined according to Hair et al. (2010).
To illustrate the validity of exogenous and endogenous variables (Spirituality and Performance), factor loading analyses were conducted and individual constructs were taken into consideration separately. Spirituality indicators are offered as primary and modified measurement models in Figure 1. In this figure, the numbers indicated on paths signify the factor loadings between spirituality and its indicators. The acceptable level of standardized factor loading is to be more than 0.5 (Argyris and Schön, 1997).
A Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was conducted. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is a powerful and flexible statistical technique which is commonly used in psychology research (Gallagher and Brown, 2013). CFA considers on exhibiting the relationship between manifest (observed) indicators and underlying latent variables (Gallagher and Brown, 2013).
The tested model for spirituality is shown in Figure 1a is not acceptable (Chi-Square/df <3, RMSEA <0.08). Modification indices showed that SP4 was highly correlated with SP5. Therefore, SP4 was dropped bur the CR value for multivariate Kurtosis was 13.38.
However, in testing for multivariate normality, the CR value for multivariate Kurtosis is 47.725 which are more than five (5). Therefore, the multivariate assumption was not met. As a resolution, Bootstrap analysis was performed with 1000 applicants, and results revealed a p-value of 0.22 which concluded that model correctness was achieved.  Perceived performance was the latent variable of the study. Similar analysis was done as above to attain the model correctness. The measurement model was developed, after deriving the model correctness.

Measurement Model
After conducting CFA, the measurement model was derived. This model is illustrated in Figure 2 which certifies that it had accorded all the modification indices and therefore, the model correctness was attained. Consequently, the measurement model was taken into consideration as the final model for further investigation.  Table 2. Depicts the summary of modification indices to assess whether the model is fit enough for further analysis After conducting the CFA, Average variance extracted (AVE) was reported as 0.504 and Composite Reliability (CR) was drawn as 0.5 which depicts the model to be accepted.

Structural Model
Structural modeling is applied next to identify the hypothesized connection among research constructs (exogenous or endogenous), which is linked to the assumed model's concept. Hypothesis 1 (H1): There is a significant relationship between spirituality and perceived performance of the players.
According to Figure 2, all the threshold limits of the modification indices were achieved. According to Figure 2, there is a strong positive relationship between spirituality and perceived performance of the players.

Discussion and Conclusion
The main concentration of this study was made in this research was to assess the relationship between spirituality and perceived performance of the players. The overreaching objective was to synthesize data from SEM in order to examine the relationship between said variables.
The study results reveal that there is a association between spirituality and perceived team performance of the players. Results, furthermore reveals that when spirituality beliefs are higher, players perceive that their performance also to be higher leading to a positive relationship ( = .129, < .001).
Qualitative studies done by several scholars had proven that spirituality beliefs leads to better performance of the players (Johnson, 2011;Sarkar et al., 2014). The results of the current study are consistent with the empirical findings of research conducted by Javanmard (2012). Based on Arak's Machinery Company study findings it was revealed that work place spirituality impacts on employee performance (Javanmard, 2012). The results also complied with Pandey et al. (2016), Maleki et al. (2012), Garg (2017) and (Malik and Naeem, 2011).
The pragmatic result of this study concluded that the hypothesis regarding spirituality is accepted. Sri Lankan culture is enriched with Buddhist philosophy, ad other religious beliefs persist in the country. Vast number of individuals in Sri Lanka relies and believes on spiritual presence. The players of team sports in Sri Lanka, tend to get the blessings of the three religious preachers before any tournament, which show how players depend on aspects of spirituality.