Communication for the win: task benefits of coach confirmation in collegiate athletics

ABSTRACT

There is a heuristic and practical need to identify prosocial coaching behaviors that benefit both the relational climates on sports teams and team performance. This study considers the influence of coaches’ use of confirmation (i.e., consisting of acceptance and challenge) on student-athletes’ self-confidence, team task cohesion, and team winning. Data collected from 117 Division-I student-athletes, who participated in team sports, partially supported the task benefits of confirmation, especially challenge. It was found that as coaches call upon student-athletes to refine their skills in a manner that confirms their potential, they become more confident and perceive more cohesion with teammates. This cohesion in turn leads to team winning (i.e., what we term the Communication-Cohesion-Performance Model). This data extends confirmation theory to a novel context and addresses a practical need of sporting practitioners by providing prescriptive advice for leveraging communication to improve team performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Coach communication
• cohesion
• confirmation
• self-confidence
• sport communication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gregory Cranmer

Gregory A. Cranmer is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Clemson University and a Fellow of the Robert H. Sports Science Institute, who studies athlete-coach interactions and issues of team functioning. Erin Ash is an Associate Professor of Communication at Clemson University, who studies media effects and identity within sport. Joey Fontana (Class of 2020) and Sai Datta Mikkilineni (Class of 2021) are both MA students in the Communication, Technology, and Society program at Clemson University.