A2 Psychology at Spalding Grammar School

The earliest view of this was that leaders are born, not made: the “great man” approach. All successful leaders, from Julius Caesar to Jack Bauer, were thought to have certain traits (intelligence, assertiveness, ambition, they are usually dominant males).  One of the earliest writers about what makes a “great man” was the Roman writer Plutarch [right], whose book Parallel Lives (c. AD 100) sets biographies of great Romans beside great Greeks for the reader to find comparisons. The “Great Man” approach suggests great leaders would excel in any field, so a great football coach could equally well have been a successful general, and vice versa. Early psychologists focused on the behavioural aspects of leadership. Andrew Halpin (1966) suggests two aspects of good leadership:

1. Consideration: good leaders foster good relations and treat everyone equally (ie they promote social cohesion)
2. Initiating structure: good leaders are focused on the task and direct the group to achieve the task (ie they also promote task cohesion)

Some of the earliest research into leadership styles was by Kurt Lewin et al. (1939) who studied the adult leaders at boys’ youth clubs where the 11-year-old boys had arts & crafts tasks like making masks. The boys were placed into three groups and the groups were matched on the boys’ IQ and popularity. The researchers noted the effects of three styles of leadership (Lewin calls them “climates”) on productivity and aggression:

• Autocratic: the authoritarian leader tells the group who is doing what and how; comments are not invited. This style does not foster good relations and when the adult was absent the boys tended to slow down or stop. The boys became either APATHETIC or AGGRESSIVE when things went wrong. However, this group achieved good results (74% of time spent working) – the autocratic style works best when the team is working towards a specific goal.
• Democratic: the participative leader encourages individuals in the team to get involved; ideas are listened to and discussion is encouraged, but the leader still gets the final decision. This group continued to work well when the adult was absent and cooperated when things went wrong. However, it was less productive than the autocratic group (50% of time working).
• Laissez-faire: also known as delegative leadership, this is where group members get on with things in their own way. Leaders may help individuals out with difficulties but offer no direction or involvement. These groups were the most aggressive when things went wrong, gave up easily and were the least productive.

Overall, the democratic climate produced the best outcomes: the children worked independently, had good relationships and morale was high. However, it should be noted that the autocratic climate produced more finished masks and a minority of children stated that they preferred the autocratic climate.

Lewin was a very influential social psychologist. He later replicated the same experiment, getting the leaders to swap their leadership styles. Each leader could, apparently quite easily, adopt different leadership styles, which shows that leadership style is a different thing from personality.

Nevertheless, many researchers remained interested in the “Great Man” approach and looked for key traits that successful leaders have in common. Ralph Stogdill (1948) carried out a META-ANALYSIS by searching through all the published research into leadership and identifying factors that were studied by at least three investigators. Stogdill looked at factors like age, height, appearance and intelligence. In general, Stogdill’s findings were contradictory: some leaders were young but other studies found them to be older; tallness is associated with leadership sometimes but Napoleon, Hitler and Ghandi were all short; leaders tend to be brighter than average but too much intelligence seems to work against effective leadership. The only consistent finding was that leaders were fluent in their speech, using vivid and original expressions.

Many psychologists have criticized taking a dispositional view of leadership, as if leadership was about some “Great Man” with certain special qualities. Fred Fiedler (1964) argued that leadership was contingent upon a number of situational factors, so this approach picked up the name “contingency theory”. Fiedler divided leaders into those who are

1. relationship-motivated (democratic behaviour, promotes social cohesion) or
2. task-motivated (autocratic behaviour, promotes task cohesion)

When Fielder compared this with different sorts of tasks he found that simple/well-learned or difficult/unfamiliar tasks required a task-orientated leader, but moderately challenging tasks benefit from having a relationship-motivated leader. In other words, there is no one type of “perfect” leadership style; it is all contingent on the situation and leadership behaviour that works in one situation won’t necessarily work in another. True leaders are flexible: they have a range of strategies at their disposal and can switch quickly between them based on who they’re dealing with and what the challenge is. This mixture of situational and dispositional thinking is an INTERACTIONIST approach. An advantage of an interactionist approach to leadership is that it stops being a fixed quality that someone either has or lacks and it becomes a set of skills that can be taught. Nevertheless, Fiedler’s research was done in an office environment and isn’t sport-specific.

Packianathan Chelladurai (left) worked with Albert Carron (right, 1978) to develop a sport-specific contingency theory of leadership, based on Fiedler’s model. This is called the multidimensional model of leadership (MML). The MML identifies 5 key dimensions of leadership behaviour:

• Training & instruction: how the coach improves players’ performances
• Democratic behaviour: how the coach encourages collective decision-making
• Autocratic behaviour: how the coach asserts his own authority
• Social support: the concern the coach shows for others’ wellbeing
• Feedback: the positive reinforcement the coach provides

This model emphasises the need for flexibility; coaches need to employ a range of teaching styles: encouraging inexperienced players, being more demanding with more mature players, etc. Chelladurai links this model back to Lewin’s research into leadership climate, but shows in more detail how a climate is created. He points out the three possible leader behaviours:

• Prescribed behaviour is how the organization demands that a leader behaves – following the rules, discipline system and traditions
• Preferred behaviour is how the team members would like their leader to behave
• Actual behaviour is what the leader really does

Chelladurai argues that a LAISSEZ-FAIRE climate is created when prescribed, preferred and actual behaviour are all incongruent – they don’t match up. For example, the leader isn’t following the rules or meeting the group’s expectations. If all three are congruent then the group will perform at its best and everyone will be satisfied. Other combinations produce less satisfactory results: if prescribed and actual leadership behaviour are congruent (the leader is following the rules) but preferred behaviour is different, the group will be unhappy. If prescribed and preferred are congruent (the group want the rules to be followed) but actual behaviour is different then some sort of rebellion is on the cards! If preferred leadership is congruent with actual leadership (the group get the leader they want) but incongruent with prescribed leadership, everybody will be happy but performance may suffer.

Chelladurai has created a sport-specific model of leadership that takes into account all the different things a team captain or coach might find themselves doing. For example, sport leaders have to follow the rules of the game (prescribed and actual behaviour are congruent) but sometimes they might want to break the rules in order to make a point; quite often the players want to break the rules (prescribed behaviour and preferred behaviour are incongruent) and the leader has to persuade them not to.

Based on the MML, Packianathan Chelladurai created the Leadership Scale for Sports (LSS) to measure how effective a coach is. The questionnaire has 40 items, each preceded by “The coach should…” followed by 5 options (always, often, occasionally, seldom, never).  The scale helps coaches identify which of the 5 areas of the MML they need to develop.

Coaches can give guidance to players in three ways:

• Verbal guidance involves the coach speaking to the players, either giving instructions or feedback. It must be clear, concise and relevant.
• Visual guidance links in very closely with Self-Efficacy, since the coach provides a demonstration for the player to copy.
• Manual guidance involves providing physical assistance. This gives the athlete extra confidence while they become familiar with the new skill. For example, a coach teaching a young rugby player how to hold a ball before a kick might put his hands over the player’s to help the player get a ‘feel’ for how it should be done.

Nevertheless, a lot of traditional coaching involved a “winning is everything” mentality that involved giving lots of time and attention to elite players, leaving others in the group feeling demotivated and alienated. Coaches were notorious for having favourites, bullying less athletic players and having a “do as-I-say, not as-I-do” philosophy.

Ronald Smith & Frank Smoll (1979) made a study of coaches’ behaviour and the effect it had on players. They devised the Coaching Behaviour Assessment System (CBAS), an observational scale that identifies 12 types of coaching, such as technical instruction, reinforcement, punishment and encouragement. The CBAS has shown that players are often a better judge of the coach’s behaviour than the coach is, and that the coach’s behaviour affects the players’ attitudes to the sport and to each other.

In 1979 Smith & Smoll designed the Coach Effectiveness Training programme (CET) to teach youth coaches about team-building, esteem-nurturing and example-setting. Based on cognitive-behavioural therapy techniques, CET teaches coaches to be aware of their own behaviour and understand how their behaviour affects young athletes. CET also encourages coaches to improve children's skills and reward their efforts, rather than the "winning is everything" philosophy common in sports (ie. goal-orientation rather than win-orientation). Smith & Smoll produced guidelines for coaching and recommended extrinsic rewards, which should be:

• a result of a particular behaviour rather than a generalised “well done”, eg. feedback about techniques
• given immediately, to strengthen the association between the behaviour and its reinforcement
• applied intermittently, so behaviour continues even without reinforcement

Smith & Smoll took 34 Seattle-based Little League Baseball coaches and trained 18 in CET. The training session lasted about 2 hours. The coaches were observed for 2 weeks and the children were given self-esteem questionnaires. Children with CET-trained coaches reported greater enjoyment and enthusiasm for the coming season than those in the control group. Their confidence was higher, their anxiety was lower and there was less aggression. The children who started with the lowest self-esteem reported the most dramatic improvement. Teams with CET-trained coaches also won more often (55% compared with 45%).

With childhood obesity on the rise and childhood participation in sports dropping off, getting and keeping kids involved in sports is becoming ever more important. Smith & Smoll's CET program helps coaches make sports personally fulfilling for young athletes. The athletes of CET-trained coaches also keep up their sports habits longer than do athletes of non-trained coaches. More than 18,000 coaches in the US, Canada, and Israel have been trained in CET, and an estimated 1.5 million children have benefited from the healthy psychological environment that trained coaches create. These coaches and athletes hail from a variety of organizations, including Little League Baseball, the U.S. Soccer Federation, Boys' and Girls' Clubs, Catholic Youth Organizations, YMCA, and public school districts. Recently, adults on teams, in boardrooms, and even in two major league baseball organizations have started using CET-trained coaches, instructors and managers.