Abstract
Much importance has been assigned to the role of the team captain. In this article, we test whether today’s team captains live up to these high expectations. Furthermore, we provide greater insight into the selection procedures leading to a captain’s appointment and assess how this process impacts upon the captain’s perceived leadership qualities. Adopting a mixed methods design, a total of 398 participants (226 players and 172 coaches) listed the attributes of both their current team captain and their ideal captain. Altogether, participants listed 635 attributes for their current team captain and 919 attributes for their ideal team captain. Both inductive and deductive approaches were used to analyze these qualitative data. Furthermore, quantitative data were obtained on the perceived influencers in the captain’s selection process. The results indicated that, although players and coaches expect their team captains to have good motivational and social leadership skills, the selection process is often underpinned by non-leadership factors, such as experience, sport-specific competence, or irrelevant attributes, such as being the daughter of the club president. This discrepancy held for both coaches’ and players’ perspectives, for male and female teams, across sports, and across competition levels. Although coaches were identified as main influencers in the selection process, giving players the deciding vote did not result in captains with better perceived leadership skills. The significant gap between participants’ expectations of the captain and reality highlights the need for implementing a structure of shared leadership. Furthermore, evidence-based leadership development programs are needed to maximize the team’s leadership potential.
Highlights
Once upon a time there was an emperor so fond of new clothes that he spent all his money on being well-dressed
The contrast for irrelevant attributes is striking (i.e., 49 times cited for current captains compared with only 4 cites for the ideal captain). These findings demonstrate that while leadership skills are considered to be important for team captains, in practice these skills are not always used as selection criteria
Our findings indicated that both players and coaches do expect their captain to have good leadership skills
Summary
Once upon a time there was an emperor so fond of new clothes that he spent all his money on being well-dressed. The emperor was very keen to distinguish the wise men and the fools and paid the weavers a lot of money to start their work. Money that would go directly into the weavers’ pockets as not a penny was spent on the looms. Refusing to admit that they were stupid, the emperor himself, the ministers, and the whole town admired and complimented the design and the colors of the clothes. While the emperor was parading naked on his carriage, Team Captain it was a little boy who revealed the truth: “But the emperor hasn’t got anything on.”. The little voice of innocence spread quickly amongst the crowd and caused a sigh of relief as the truth was revealed. The emperor shivered as he realized that the little boy was right and humiliated beat a retreat
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