Advancing our understanding of coach leadership: exploring the transformational leadership, coach-athlete relationship, and leading through crisis

Coach leadership has been a primary leadership resource for sports teams over the last 40 years. However, coach leadership’s conceptual relationship with sports coaching and quality coach-athlete relationship was not very explicit in the sports coaching and psychology literature. Moreover, although context is an essential component within the conception of coach leadership, there are scant studies investigating coach leadership behaviours under specific content. Therefore, the thesis aims to enhance our understanding of coach leadership, by exploring the association with quality coach-athlete relationship and leading through crisis context.

The current thesis is comprised of three studies. The first study intended to advance our fundamental understanding of coach leadership’s definition or conceptualisation by revealing the complex association between coach transformational leadership and quality coach-athlete relationship through canonical correlation analysis. Two hundred thirteen athletes based in the United Kingdom participated in the study. The results revealed that the relationship or association between coach leadership and quality coach-athlete relationship were multidirectional (positive, negative, and non-related). The result, furthermore, demonstrated that coach leadership and coach-athlete relationships were strongly associated while are two different independent concepts. Based on these findings, study one suggested that including the coach-athlete relationship in coach leadership conceptualisation is questionable.

The second study used qualitative content analysis to work on how best to implement coach transformational leadership behaviours with the help of the dual-level transformational leadership model and explored the strong association with the quality coach-athlete relationship. Forty athletes were interviewed to share their authentic perceptions about their female and male coaches’ group- and individual-level leadership and relationship-type behaviours. The results revealed that coaches’ individual-level behaviours – Individualised Support is the critical behaviour. When coaches displayed Individualised Support behaviours that were focused on a personal level or were non-performance related, athletes are more likely to perceive such behaviour as relational nurturing behaviours. Regarding the gender factors, female and male coaches displayed different emphases on leadership behaviours of Individualised Support, Providing an Appropriate Model, and High Performance Expectations. The study, therefore, suggested that coaches are encouraged to adjust their different leadership behaviours’ emphases to meet specific individual and coaching needs.

The purpose of study three was to explore coach leadership behaviours under crisis content. Specifically, thirty-two professional UK coaches who experienced the COVID-19 pandemic shared their successful crisis leadership behaviours during this crisis context with a process view of crisis events (pre, during, and post-phases). The Q methodology was used to analyse coaches’ effective crisis leadership behaviours, which were categorised into six patterns: creating a safe team environment, division of labour, team-driven, athlete-centred, consulting, and online training. Study three provided a new research topic in sports and exercise psychology and opened the way for research of coach crisis leadership.

Together, the current thesis, combined with the three stand-alone studies, literature review, and general discussion, critically provided a systematic and scientific understanding of the nature of leadership and coach leadership.