Players Within a Team: Understanding the Structure of Team Performance Through Individual Functions and Team Objectives

Abstract

Although systems thinking has been recently introduced as a means to model team performance, the most central and practically valuable question of this modeling tool is yet to be clearly addressed: how can the coaching team go from the level of team performance to the level of individual performance in order to select and evaluate players? In other words, if performance is a holistic phenomenon, how can the performance of individual players be conceptualized in relation to the whole? We appeal to the concepts of ‘objective’ and ‘function’ to show how team performance is linked to, and based on, the performance of individuals. We first describe team performance in relation to a set of objectives that are aimed to be achieved at different levels. Then we define the concept of function and break down this concept into three types, namely, positional, tactical, and interpreted function. We draw conceptual connections between different types of function and different levels of objectives. These connections show how each type of function links individual performance with team performance and how a team can be engineered as a coherent whole. We finish the paper by discussing some practical implications for coaches.