Drawing from the literature in organizational psychology and the literature from sport marketing, this study proposed a five-component model of psychological commitment to sport teams. They are personal identity (i.e., a sense of oneness with or belonging to a team that defines one's self-identity), affective commitment (i.e., emotional attachment based on the fan's liking for the team), calculative commitment (i.e., based on the monetary and psychological costs of leaving the team), social obligation (i.e., based on fan's compliance to social norms and pressure from significant others), and regional tribalism (i.e., based on fan's perception of connection between the team and the place to which the fan is attached).
Two studies were conducted to develop a scale to measure the identified five components of fans' psychological commitment to sport teams. Study 1 involved generation of 39 items to measure the five components, verification of the subscales and their items by two different panels of experts, and purification of the subscales through factor analyses, item-to-total correlations, and reliability estimates from the data provided by 112 university students. The findings suggested the division of calculative commitment into resources cost and psychological cost. In Study 2 involving 266 university students, the modified scale with 43 items reflecting the six components was subjected to confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) with LISREL 8.3. Based on the initial CFA, the scale was refined to include 30 items. The second CFA supported the reasonableness of the scale of the six-component model. Further, the six dimensions were differently related with selected antecedents (tenure of fanship and sentimentality) and consequences (i.e., following games, purchasing licensed products, intention to follow games, and intention to switch). These results supported the distinctiveness of the six dimensions of the model of fans' psychological commitment. The six-component model of fans' psychological commitment and the scale to measure them (i.e., Scale of Psychological Commitment to Sport Teams (SPCST)) should enrich the body of knowledge in the field of sport management, and facilitate further sport fan behavior research.