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Although coaches and players recognize the importance of leaders within the team, research on athlete leadership is sparse. The present study expands knowledge of athlete leadership by refining the current classification and exploring the importance of the team captain. An online survey was completed by 4451 players and coaches within nine different team sports in Flanders (Belgium). The results revealed that the proposed additional role of motivational leader was perceived as clearly distinct from the already established roles (task, social, and external leader). Furthermore, almost half of the participants (44%) did not perceive their captain as the principal leader on any of the four roles. These findings underline that the leadership qualities attributed to the captain as the team"s formal leader are overrated. It can be concluded that leadership is spread throughout the team; the informal leaders rather than the captain take the lead, both on and off the field.

Recent theorizing applying the social identity approach to leadership proposes a four‐dimensional model of identity leadership that centres on leaders’ management of a shared sense of ‘we’ and ‘us’. This research validates a scale assessing this model – the Identity Leadership Inventory (ILI). We present results from an international project with data from all six continents and from more than 20 countries/regions with 5,290 participants. The ILI was translated (using back‐translation methods) into 13 different languages (available in the Appendix ) and used along with measures of other leadership constructs (i.e., leader–member exchange [LMX], transformational leadership, and authentic leadership) as well as employee attitudes and (self‐reported) behaviours – namely identification, trust in the leader, job satisfaction, innovative work behaviour, organizational citizenship behaviour, and burnout. Results provide consistent support for the construct, discriminant, and criterion validity of the ILI across countries. We show that the four dimensions of identity leadership are distinguishable and that they relate to important work‐related attitudes and behaviours above and beyond other leadership constructs. Finally, we also validate a short form of the ILI, noting that is likely to have particular utility in applied contexts. Practitioner points The Identity Leadership Inventory (ILI) has a consistent factor structure and high predictive value across 20 countries and can thus be used to assess a leader's ability to manage (team and organizational) identities in a range of national and cultural contexts. Identity leadership as perceived by employees is uniquely related to important indicators of leadership effectiveness including employees’ relationship to their team (identification and perceived team support), well‐being (job satisfaction and reduced burnout), and performance (citizenship and innovative behaviour at work). The ILI can be used in practical settings to assess and develop leadership, for instance, in 360‐degree feedback systems. The short form of the ILI is also a valid assessment of identity leadership, and this is likely to be useful in a range of applied contexts (e.g., those where there is a premium on cost and time or when comparing multiple leaders or multiple time points).

The present study examined the impact of athlete leaders' perceived confidence on their teammates' confidence and performance. Male basketball players (N = 102) participated in groups of 4. To manipulate leaders' team confidence, the appointed athlete leader of each newly formed basketball team (a confederate) expressed either high or low team confidence. The results revealed an effect of team confidence contagion such that team members had greater team confidence when the leader expressed high (rather than low) confidence in the team's success. Second, the present study sought to explain the mechanisms through which this contagion occurs. In line with the social identity approach to leadership, structural equation modeling demonstrated that this effect was partially mediated by team members' increased team identification. Third, findings indicated that when leaders expressed high team confidence, team members' performance increased during the test, but when leaders expressed low confidence, team members' performance decreased. Athlete leaders thus have the capacity to shape team members' confidence--and hence their performance--in both positive and negative ways. In particular, by showing that they believe in "our team," leaders are able not only to make "us" a psychological reality, but also to transform "us" into an effective operational unit.

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Based on Self-Determination Theory, the present study adopts a helicopter-perspective towards motivating (i.e., autonomy support, structure) and demotivating coaching (i.e., control, chaos). Among five independent samples, consisting of individual and team sport coaches (N = 893; Mage = 37.83 years) and athletes (N = 377; Mage = 17.46 years), Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) analyses were used to examine how a variety of coaching practices reflective of four different coaching styles (i.e., autonomy support, control, structure, and chaos), assessed with a new vignette-based instrument, related to one another.Findings revealed that the (de)motivating practices could be graphically presented within a two-dimensional circumplex, with the horizontal axis representing the level of needsupportive coaching behavior and the vertical axis representing the level of coach directiveness. Moreover, the four coaching styles could be segmented in eight more specific approaches (i.e. clarifying, guiding, attuning, participative, awaiting, abandoning, domineering, and demanding), which formed an ordered sinusoid pattern of correlations, both among each other and in relation to a variety of critical outcomes (e.g. coach need satisfaction, athletes' motivation). It is discussed how a circumplex approach produces both a more integrative and more fine-grained insight regarding (de)motivating coaching behaviour, with resulting implications for practice.

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Research on the effect of athlete leadership on pre-cursors of team performance such as team confidence is sparse. To explore the underlying mechanisms of how athlete leaders impact their team's confidence, an online survey was completed by 2,867 players and coaches from nine different team sports in Flanders (Belgium). We distinguished between two types of team confidence: collective efficacy, assessed by the CEQS subscales of Effort, Persistence, Preparation, and Unity; and team outcome confidence, measured by the Ability subscale. The results demonstrated that the perceived quality of athlete leaders was positively related to participants' team outcome confidence. The present findings are the first in sport settings to highlight the potential value of collective efficacy and team identification as underlying processes. Because high-quality leaders strengthen team members' identification with the team, the current study also provides initial evidence for the applicability of the identity based leadership approach in sport settings.Keywords: peer leaders, leadership, winning confidence, social identity approach, coaching, The most talented group of players does not always win a sports game. What matters is how well these players function as a team. In order to optimize this team functioning, effective leadership has been proposed as a crucial determinant (Cotterill, 2013). Although research in sport has typically focused on leadership of the coach (Chelladurai, 2007), recent research has established the importance of high-quality athlete leaders for the effective functioning of sports teams (Price & Weiss, 2011, 2013. In this regard, athletes are an important, but so far underinvestigated, source of leadership within sports teams.Building upon earlier work (Carron, Hausenblas, & Eys, 2005;Kogler Hill, 2001), Loughead and colleagues (2006) proposed a three-factor classification of athlete leadership functions: (1) task functions, which help the team to achieve its goal (e.g., giving teammates tactical advice); (2) social functions, which foster positive interactions between team members (e.g., caring for a good atmosphere off the field); and (3) external functions, which facilitate communication with people outside the team (e.g., with club management, media, and sponsors). Recently, empirical evidence has been reported for a fourth function, namely the motivational function (Fransen, Vanbeselaere, De Cuyper, Vande Broek, & Boen, 2014).The motivational leader is the best motivator on the field. This leader encourages his/her teammates to do their utmost, and initiates fresh heart into players who are discouraged.Although previous research on athlete leadership mainly focused on the team captain as the formal leader of the team, recent empirical evidence demonstrated that informal leaders rather than the captain take the lead, both on and off the field . We will therefore focus on the leadership quality of the best athlete leader on each of the four leadership roles instead of investigating the leadershi...