Abstract: Relative importance of individual self esteem versus collective self esteem for judgments of general life satisfaction and career satisfaction (i.e., training and competition satisfaction) was compared. The participants were 139 Chinese athletes with an average age of 19.64 years. Among them 68 were males and 71 were females. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that collective self esteem added 13% explained variance to career satisfaction although it failed to add new explained variance to general life satisfaction beyond demographic variables, individual self esteem and social support. Dominant analyses further indicated that when predicting general life satisfaction, 57% of the predicted variance was attributed to individual self esteem. When predicting career satisfaction 67% of the predicted variance was attributed to collective self esteem. These results suggested that different self esteems are needed to predict different satisfactions.

Key words: sindividual self esteem, collective self esteem, general life satisfaction, career satisfaction