What´s Team Cohesion?

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When looking at team sports, the eye is quickly drawn to the superstar player: the quarterback who goes out and throws all the touchdown passes, the basketball player who scores 30 points a night, or the baseball player leading the team in home runs. Sports fans have quickly learned, that having a successful player on your team does not mean having a successful team. To judge the success of a team, one has to look beyond the superstar and look at the team as a whole. The guy who sits at the end of the bench is equally important at the end of the day. But, the person who holds the most crucial role is the head coach.
The connection between coaching and team cohesion has been described by a number of researchers, most prominently Carron and Chelladurai (1981). These two elements, coaching and cohesion, are central to the development of any group, but become even more important for a team sport. The ways leaders promote and create high levels of group cohesion have a dramatic effect on the way a group performs (Carron & Chelladurai, 1981). These factors become evident in the way coaches use motivational techniques to ensure their athletes will compete at the highest possible level (Turman, 2003).
Team cohesion is defined as a dynamic process that is reflected in the tendency of a group to remain united in the pursuit of its goals and objectives (Turman, 2003). It can be said that even if a team is unsuccessful on the court, they may still exhibit a high level of team cohesiveness (Turman, 2003). Success is not dependent on how much cohesiveness a team exhibits.
Coaching leadership style refers to how a coach chooses to lead his or her own team (Fatemeh, Rahim, Mohammad, & Anoushiravan, 2012). He does this through the way he ru...

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...g, the population was limited and results could be generalized if random sampling took place. Another limitation was the number of participants. If a larger sample had taken place, more information could have been used to find significance. Another limitation of this study is the surveying of athletes. Athletes could have a bias towards their coach and this could influence the results of the survey.
Further research could look to include more sports teams and include females in the study. It could also look to survey the respective coaches to see what they believe their coaching leadership style is. Further study could also be conducted by comparing the level of team cohesion to their season ending winning percentage. This would allow for nominal data to be taken into account and the assessment of the correlation between team cohesion and team winning percentage.

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