The Relationships Between Coaching Efficacy and Group Cohesion

In any sports competition, an individual athlete or a team would participates targeting better performance for achieving success. The likely success of an athlete or a team is the result of better preparation and hard efforts. It is obvious that an individual athlete or a team preparation for successful sports performance requires multi-dimensional considerations that include physiological, psychological, technical, and other aspects. The success of a team mainly depends on the behavior of members or players of that particular team. The two components of such behaviors of individuals attached to the team are leadership and team cohesion. At the same time, behaviors of individuals in a team are not isolated, they are interrelated. One’s action, decision or behavior of an individual or group in a team may affect others and their behavior too. In the Games to achieve exceptional results in the assessment made by the Ministry of Education. Carron (1982) defines team cohesion as a dynamic process which is reflected in the tendency for a team to stick together and remain united in the pursuit of goals and objectives. Team cohesion is a key factor most likely to affect players’ feeling of approval and sport performance, and team cohesion will help determine the result of a contest (Carron and Chelladurai, 1981; Lu, 1994). Martens and Peterson (1971) also corroborate our finding with experiments that higher team cohesion will lead to better sport performance. As for methods to enhance team cohesion so as to improve contest results, a coach's leadership behavior is evaluated as a significant feature and the relationship between coach’s leadership behavior and team cohesion has been studied (Carron and Chelladurai, 1981; Schreisheim, 1987; Westre and Weiss, 1991; Chen, 1993; Wu, 2002; Chiu, 2002; Lin, 2001; Chang, 2005; Lee, 2010). Although coach's leadership behavior has been found to have a profound influence on school team members, support from school and teammates should also have an important collision on team cohesion. Eisenberger et al. (1986) developed perceived organizational support theory, which is defined as “the extent to which employees perceive that their donations are valued by their organization and that the firm cares about their well-being” and argued that it will influence employees’ expectations and commitment to the organization.

Perfect and efficient management is required in any winning teamwork. Individuals need a manager or a group leader in order to attain their goals in a group. This leader must possess skills and characteristics necessary for leadership of the group in order to lead members of the team toward a desired goal. A coach holds this position in sports [4]. Based on the experience acquired from professional sports, coaches who are technically and scientifically excellent, play an effective role in their players success and better demonstration of players’ cooperation. In fact, coaching is one the complex careers that cannot be done by anyone. An efficient coach utilizes his/her knowledge and experience in order to improve athletes' performance and ultimately his team success. Sports psychologists believe that athletes not only need to elevate their self-awareness but also need to understand the roles, views, values, motivations and team members is the basis of team structuring processes other sports. Psychologists also recognized the importance of mutual agreement among team members and the confirmed the benefits of team vitality. For example, Orlick (1990) has expressed that many problems among members of a group is due to the lack of understanding the needs, motivations and feelings of their teammates [2]. In addition, Gould et al (1999) proposed that since members of sports teams have the chance to mutually share thoughts, feelings and ideas on specific subjects, some activities must be performed among them in order to improve bilateral collaboration and team cohesion [1]. Task and social cohesions must be emphasized in the team cohesion, which are independent of each other [3, 1].

• A coach should promote training and instruction leadership style , democratic leadership style, social support style and positive feedback behavior among his team.

• A coach should also promote a culture of both type of cohesion, namely task cohesion and social cohesion among his team.

• A rigorous study including observational method should be done in the future to pinpoint the appropriate leadership style and team cohesion.

The goal of present study was to examine the relationship of coaching efficacy with team cohesion and collective efficacy. Our findings confirmed that there is direct association between coaching efficacy dimensions (such as motivational, technical, game plan, and character building efficacy) and team cohesion factors (including individual’s functional and social attractions in a group as well as group cohesion). This association suggests that the dimensions of coaching efficacy can predict the overall team cohesion and collective efficacy.

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