The effect of structural empowerment on professional commitment of Iranian football premier league referees by job characterstics mediating

The purpose of the present study was the effect of structural empowerment on the professional commitment of the referees of the Iranian Men's and Women's Football Premier League through mediation of job characteristics. In terms of purpose, the study was applied and based on the method of data collection, it was descriptive-correlation. The sample population consisted of 185 referees(130 men and 55 women), all of whom were selected as a sample of the study. Data collection tools include a combination of the Structural Empowerment Questionnaire of Kordanij et al.‌(1394) and Kanter(1993), the Professional Commitment Questionnaire of Arania et al.‌(1999) and the job characteristics of Jako (2004).The questions of these three questionnaires were 46 numbers on a 5-point Likert scale. 10 sports management specialists and refereeing experts confirmed the face and content validity of the questionnaires. Convergent and divergent validity was confirmed by Fornell and Larker indexes. The combined reliability of all three questionnaires was 0.92, 0.89 and 0.84, respectively, the total reliability of the questionnaire was obtained through Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 85%.To analyze the data, the structural equation modeling method was used by using Smart PLS software. According to the results, only the effect of structural empowerment on professional commitment was T-Value = 1.875 and -0.129 = negative and meaningless). But the effect of structural empowerment on job characteristics T-Value=5.671, the effect of job characteristics on professional commitment T-Value=‌ -6/708 and the effect of structural empowerment on professional commitment mediated Job characteristics were reported to be positive and significant (T-Value = 549/549). Information sharing among the dimensions of structural empowerment, interest between the dimensions of professional commitment and diversity of skills among job characteristics were the highest averages.