Abstract
Objectives
Researchers have argued that leadership is one of the most important determinants
of team effectiveness. The present study examined the extent to which the perceived
quality of athlete leadership was related to the effectiveness of elite sports teams.
Design
Three professional football teams (N = 135) participated in our study during the preparation phase for the Australian 2016
season.
Methods
Players and coaching staff were asked to assess players’ leadership quality in four
leadership roles (as task, motivational, social, and external leader) via an online
survey. The leadership quality in each of these roles was then calculated in a social
network analysis by averaging the indegree centralities of the three best leaders
in that particular role. Participants also rated their team’s performance and its
functioning on multiple indicators.
Results
As hypothesized, the team with the highest-quality athlete leadership on each of the
four leadership roles excelled in all indicators of team effectiveness. More specifically,
athletes in this team had a stronger shared sense of the team’s purpose, they were
more highly committed to realizing the team’s goals, and they had a greater confidence
in their team’s abilities than athletes in the other teams. Moreover, this team demonstrated
a higher task-involving and a lower ego-involving climate, and excelled on all measures
of performance.
Conclusions
High-quality athlete leadership is positively related to team effectiveness. Given
the importance of high-quality athlete leadership, the study highlights the need for
well-designed empirically-based leadership development programs.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: January 24, 2017
Accepted:
November 21,
2016
Received in revised form:
November 18,
2016
Received:
May 31,
2016
Identification
Copyright
© 2017 Sports Medicine Australia. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
