Abstract
Athlete leadership researchers have typically investigated three dimensions of athlete leadership behaviors, which include the meta-categories of task-, social-, and external-oriented leadership. More recently, motivational leadership was added as a fourth dimension. Researchers in organizational leadership have advanced another dimension, referred to as change-oriented leadership (Yukl, 2012). Therefore, in the present study, we tested a four-dimensional model that includes the dimensions of task-, social-, external-, and change-oriented leadership. Two samples of 161 athletes and 69 coaches rated every player on their team on the four-dimensional model and on perceived athlete leadership effectiveness. A multilevel regression analysis showed that all four dimensions of athlete leadership significantly predicted perceived athlete leadership effectiveness for players and three dimensions (i.e., social-, task-, and change-oriented leadership) for coaches. These results support the importance of change-oriented leadership in relation to athlete leadership.
Highlights
Leadership is a crucial component for team functioning in high-performance sport teams (Chelladurai, 2007)
In order to determine whether the addition of change-oriented leadership is relevant for athlete leadership research, we investigated whether this dimension contributes unique variance to a model predicting perceived leadership effectiveness and whether the inclusion of change orientation improved the model fit
The results for players and coaches support the inclusion of change-oriented leadership as a fourth dimension within the athlete leadership taxonomy
Summary
Leadership is a crucial component for team functioning in high-performance sport teams (Chelladurai, 2007). Researchers have demonstrated that effective leadership is associated with increased individual performance (Bormann and Rowold, 2016), positive motivational climate (Seifriz et al, 1992; Duda, 2001), intrinsic motivation (Amorose and Horn, 2000), collective efficacy (Magyar et al, 2004; Price and Weiss, 2013), increased team cohesion, and athlete satisfaction (Kim and Cruz, 2016). These results are not surprising since leadership constitutes a fundamental process in group dynamics. Empirical studies have demonstrated a relationship between athlete leadership and team cohesion (Price and Weiss, 2011; Loughead et al, 2016), team resilience (Morgan et al, 2013, 2015), athlete satisfaction (Eys et al, 2007), role clarity (Crozier et al, 2013), and team effectiveness (Fransen et al, 2017)
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