Is perceived athlete leadership quality related to team effectiveness? A comparison of three professional sports teams.

Katrien Fransen,Niklas K Steffens,Kim Peters,Filip Boen,Clifford J Mallett,S Alexander Haslam

doi:10.1016/j.jsams.2016.11.024

Katrien Fransen, Niklas K Steffens + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsams.2016.11.024

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Abstract

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. Three professional football teams (N=135) participated in our study during the preparation phase for the Australian 2016 season. 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. 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. 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.

Highlights

It has long been argued that effective leadership is central to team functioning and high performance in elite sport 1
The team with the highest-quality athlete leadership on each of the four leadership roles excelled in all indicators of team effectiveness
High-quality athlete leadership is positively related to team effectiveness

Summary

Introduction

It has long been argued that effective leadership is central to team functioning and high performance in elite sport 1. Vertical leadership (i.e., where the leader is positioned hierarchically above the team) has been foregrounded in both research and practice. In line with this vertical approach, organizational leadership research has focused on the influence of managers on employees and sports leadership research has examined the impact of coaches on athletes. A radical shift has occurred away from this traditional emphasis on vertical leadership towards the idea that leadership can, and should, be shared 2, 3 This approach asserts that leadership does emanate from the formal leader, and from team members more generally. A number of studies have corroborated these claims by demonstrating an overall positive relationship between shared leadership and team performance 2, 5, 6

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