Essay On Team Cohesion

Team Cohesion, Player Roles, Leadership

Team cohesion is working together with each other and staying united as group to achieve a common objective, i.e. the cohesiveness of the group of individuals that make up the team including the players, coaches and others that work with and assist the team. Hodges (as cited by Moran, 2004, p 246) emphasizes that a ‘team’ is people coming together to achieve a common purpose. While Alderer (cited by Moran, 2004, p 246) defined a ‘group’ as “an intact social system, complete with boundaries and interdependence for some shared purpose and differentiated member roles”. Cohesiveness means that the individuals feel they belong to the group, look out for each other and feel they need to bond with each other

(cited from Moran, 2004, p 252) identified a model for group cohesion to better show its relationships. In this model group cohesion can be either group integration, which represents the member perception of attachment to the group, and individual attraction to the group i.e. what keeps him/her with the group. Each of these could be a form of task or social cohesion. Task cohesion is members orienting themselves to a goal and working together for a common outcome, while social cohesion has to do with how much the members like each other and like being with the others and making sure you achieve what you wanted. When these are integrated in the model, team cohesion can be seen as multidimensional as four different parts: group integration-task (GI-T), group integration-social (GI-S), individual attractions to group-task (ATG-T) and individual attractions to group-social (ATG-S). Team cohesion can be measured by direct ways and indirect ways. In the direct method players are asked how much they like every team member and the points are added and give a score. This is not used much as the indirect method gives a better feel for the level of cohesion, which is done by asking each player if they enjoy playing with the team and if the team plays as a