Abstract
An athlete leader is defined as an athlete occupying a formal or informal role influencing team members towards achieving a common goal (Loughead et al., 2006). The majority of athlete leadership research has examined leader behaviours and cohesion from the athletes' perspective. That is, the athletes' ratings of the leadership provided to them (e.g., Price & Weiss, 2011). The purpose of the present study was to examine the association between self-rated athlete leader behaviours and perceptions of cohesion in sport teams. Athletes (N = 299) self-identified their leadership status as occupying a formal, informal, or no leadership role within their team. Next, the participants rated (a) the frequency of their own leadership behaviours using the Leadership Scale for Sports (Chelladurai & Saleh, 1980) and (b) two dimensions of cohesion (individual attractions to the group task and social) from the Group Environment Questionnaire (Carron et al., 1985). The results demonstrated that the self-rated athlete leader behaviour of social support was positively related to both individual attractions to the group-task (beta = .26, p< .001) and individual attractions to the group-social (beta = .60, p< .001). The results are discussed in terms of the implications for understanding the role of athletes in sport leadership.
