Professional decision-making under accountability pressure: Emotional and intervention recalibration following failure in applied sport psychology.

Failure is a central feature of competitive sport, yet research has predominantly focused on athletes' coping processes while comparatively little attention has been paid to how applied sport psychologists make professional decisions in failure situations characterized by varying accountability demands. Drawing on professional judgment and accountability frameworks, the present study examined external scrutiny as a contextual accountability condition associated with practitioners' emotional responses and intervention prioritization following failure. Using a within-person vignette-based design, 204 applied sport psychology practitioners from German-speaking professional contexts, primarily Germany, Austria, and Switzerland evaluated two standardized failure situations that differed solely in the degree of external evaluative pressure while the substantive setback remained constant. Emotional reactions and intervention priorities were analyzed using generalized estimating equations to account for repeated observations within practitioners. External scrutiny was associated with higher reported anger and differences in intervention prioritization. Compared with internally framed failure, externally scrutinized contexts were associated with greater system-focused and boundary-setting orientations and reduced athlete-centered prioritization. These contextual patterns showed no substantial evidence of variation across practitioner roles and remained evident after adjusting for professional experience, self-efficacy, emotional exhaustion, and consulting style. The findings suggest that intervention sequencing may reflect a context-dependent recalibration process in addition to practitioner-level dispositions. Conceptually, these findings support viewing applied sport psychologists as decision-makers embedded within the accountability structures of performance systems and contribute to a more context-sensitive understanding of professional functioning in high-performance sport.