The “I” in team: Coach incivility, coach gender, and team performance in women’s basketball teams

Highlights

•	Incivility is common in sport but has received little research attention.
•	Collected data from women’s basketball teams, examining the influence of coach incivility.
•	Leader incivility is related to lower team cohesion, lower psychological safety, and lower objective team performance.
•	Psychological safety mediated the incivility-performance relationship, and leader gender moderated the relationships.

Abstract

Incivility is common across many sport contexts, yet empirical examination of its influence is lacking, especially when it comes to the influence of incivility on team emergent states and performance. The purpose of the present study was to address this topic by investigating the effects of leader incivility toward team members on team outcomes. The authors also examined team cohesion and psychological safety as potential mediators of the leader incivility-performance relationship and leader gender as a moderator of these mediational relationships. Participants included players from 52 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I female college basketball teams whose experiences of incivility were aggregated to the team level. As predicted, results revealed that leader incivility related to lower team cohesion, lower psychological safety, and lower objective team performance. Additionally, psychological safety mediated the incivility-performance relationship, as hypothesized. Based on these findings, the authors point to several implications, including emphasizing civility among leaders, instituting organizational policies designed to deter incivility, establishing reporting mechanisms, and implementing interventions and training.

Keywords:

• Gender
• Incivility
• Teams
• Effectiveness

Notes

1 Top-down incivility shares some characteristics with another construct in the literature: abusive supervision. Abusive supervision refers to subordinates’ perceptions of persistent non-physical verbal and nonverbal hostile behavior from their direct supervisor (Tepper, 2000, 2007). Similar to top-down incivility, abusive supervision is subjectively perceptual; that is, it is based on the perceptions of the target of the behavior. Both constructs also refer to behavior that comes from someone with a higher occupational position than the target. However, abusive supervision differs from top-down incivility in that it is behavior that is sustained over time, is used purposefully by supervisors for an objective goal, and denotes behavior from a direct supervisor (Tepper, 2000, 2007). Top-down incivility, in contrast, need not be sustained over time, is not necessarily utilitarian in nature, and can be perpetrated from anyone with higher status, not only a direct supervisor (Andersson & Pearson, 1999; Caza & Cortina, 2007).