Relationship Between Coach Leadership Behaviors And Team Cohesiveness Among Team And Individual Interscholastic Sports

Introduction

Different types of sports may have different needs and preferences from individual student-athletes. The coach may adopt either a homogenous approach that treats all athletes equally, or alternatively create a heterogeneous style that provides differential treatment to individual athletes.

The purpose of this investigation was to compare the leadership behavior of coaches and team cohesiveness in team and individual sports as perceived by student-athletes participating in interscholastic sports. The population for the research consisted of 604 student-athletes participating in several interscholastic individual and team sports in 32 high schools in Taiwan. The individual sports included badminton, table tennis, swimming, gymnastics, track and field, and tennis. The team sports included basketball, volleyball, baseball, soccer, and tug of war.

Methods

Survey instruments for collecting data consisted of the Leadership Scale for Sports (LSS) and the Group Environment Questionnaire (GEQ). A series of t tests and one-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were used to compare perceptions of members of each team and individual sport regarding the nine sub-scales of the LSS and GEQ

instruments. All significant ANOVAs were followed by Scheffe’ tests to further determine the significant by different factors. The level of significance used for the ANOVAs and Scheffe’ procedures was set at p < .05. The Bonferroni method was employed to control for Type I Error. Differences among the means were also interpreted using effect size procedures. Effect sizes between .2 and .5 are considered small, between .5 and .8 are considered medium, and .8 or greater are considered large.

Results

The results showed that there were small effect sizes for Training and Instruction (ES = .30) and Social Support (ES = .36) for interscholastic team and individual sports. The results also revealed that there was a relationship between coach leadership and team cohesiveness. Using effect size to interpret the magnitude of gender difference, boys were more satisfied than girls with Training and Instruction (ES = .64), Democratic Behavior (ES = .9 1), Social Support (ES = .79), and Positive Feedback (ES = .94).