The psychological evaluation of exercise effect on perceived stress of athlete staff: Presenting a theoretical model

Background: The study is intended to examine a model of direct and indirect effects (through mediating role of self-assessment latent variable containing self-efficacy and self-esteem components) of sports mental toughness construct (including the components of confidence, consistency and control) on perceived stress of athlete employees. Method: The researchdesign of study was correlational and its approach was structural equations. The population were all of athlete employees at National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC) that 400 of them were selected with simple random method. The applied instruments were reliable and valid. Data analysis was performed using macro program of Preacher and Hayes in SPSS-19 software and also using AMOS-20 software. Results: The results indicated that the directpath of the proposed model should be eliminated and after eliminating this path, themodel’sfitnessparameterswere optimized. Conclusion: According to the data of this research it can be concluded that one of the mechanisms of sport’s impact on perceived stress of employees is that first, it influences the three aspects of sports mental toughness and then, a mixture of these variables’ effects improve this employees’ perceived stress through increasing the self- assessment construct of them (and its components).