Big Hitters: Important Factors Characterizing Team Effectiveness in Professional Cricket

Abstract

While organizational psychology attests to the multidimensional nature of team effectiveness, insight regarding the most important factors contributing to the effectiveness of sports teams, especially elite teams, is lacking. An abductive method of qualitative enquiry was adopted to capture participants' construal of team effectiveness, drawing on the extant literature in both sport and organizational psychology. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 21 players, coaches, and psychologists involved in elite cricket, with resultant data analyzed inductively initially, before being reanalyzed deductively. Although, the narratives endorsed the value of many of the deductively derived factors, other constructs more prominent in organizational psychology (e.g., trust and intra-group conflict) appeared to be more important than traditional sport psychology group factors. The results revealed six broad themes; culture and environment, values, communication, understanding, leadership, and unique individuals, with some gender differences apparent throughout. Based on our elite sample's construal of team effectiveness, we propose a new model representing a practical, parsimonious, and novel conceptualization of the most important attributes of team effectiveness in cricket, with conceivable transferability to other team sports.

Bulls in a China Shop: Narcissism, Intragroup Conflict, and Task Cohesion

“…Secondly, our results support qualitative investigations that suggest difficult personalities (e.g., narcissists) contribute to team dysfunction (Heelis et al, 2020;Webster et al, 2017). Thus, we would suggest that developing coaches' awareness around athletes' personality (and particularly narcissism) should facilitate coaches' guidance to better resonate with athletes (Webster et al, 2017).…”

Relationships between Anxiety, Emotional Intelligence, and Motivational Climate among Adolescent Football Players

“…The present findings were similar to those obtained by Ros-Martínez et al [ 77 ], who stated that emotional skills within the sports environment are essential as they contribute to improved emotional control, avoiding responses such as stress, anxiety, or anger. As has been noted by Webster et al [ 78 ], levels of EI are higher in collective sports due to the regular interactions between players and the sharing of pressure within all members of the collective, meaning that anxiety and rash responses are reduced.…”

Does Emotional Intelligence Predict Athletes’ Motivation to Participate in Sports?

“…Although previous studies did not reveal clear trait EI differences between athletes in individual and team sports (Laborde, Guille´n, & Watson, 2017), some characteristics of team sports are important to interpreting these data. In contrast to individual sports, team sports athletes are involved with teammates and spend time training together and interacting often with each other (Kajbafnezhad, Ahadi, Heidarie, Askari, & Enayati, 2011), which also allows the pressure felt by athletes during the training sessions and competitions to be shared between members of a team (Webster, Hardy, & Hardy, 2017). In addition, competition training and participation require both the ability to overcome stress and the ability to regulate one's own emotions and those of others on the team (Laborde, Dosseville, et al, 2016;Laborde, Guille´n, & Mosley, 2016).…”