The relation between perceived need-supportive coaching behaviours, winning games, and team resilience: a longitudinal examination among basketball and soccer teams

ABSTRACT

In team resilience literature, team performance is consistently regarded as a primary outcome of resilient teams. However, empirical evidence linking team resilience to objective performance indicators such as effectively winning a game remains scarce. Drawing upon team resilience literature and Self-Determination Theory, this study firstly investigated whether team resilience predict the odds of winning. In addition, as sports teams inevitably experience common setbacks, this study examined whether athletes’ perceived need-supportive and controlling coaching behaviours predict team resilience over time. This research therefore contributes to coaching literature by providing insights into how coaches could arm teams against adversities and increase their resilience. We conducted a three-wave longitudinal study with a sample of 397 basketball and soccer players, belonging to 39 distinct teams. They completed questionnaires at the beginning, middle and end of the season. Multilevel binomial logistic regressions indicated that team resilience significantly increased the odds of winning on top of athletes’ perceived need-supportive and psychologically controlling coaching behaviours, which emerged as non-significant predictors. Random intercept cross-lagged panel models further revealed that perceived need-supportive coaching behaviours predicted higher levels of team resilience over time, while perceived psychologically controlling behaviours was associated with lower team resilience in the following waves. We conclude that team resilience is a clear predictor of actually winning a game. Although coaches’ need-supportive or controlling behaviours do not directly predict their teams’ odds of winning, it might enable them to create a resilient team capable of handling collective adversities.

KEYWORDS:

• Need-supportive coaching
• team resilience
• psychological control
• odds of winning

Data availability statement

The data of this study are available at https://osf.io/bn5uy/.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We also ran the RICLPM for this final model (where the pathways from resilience to perceived need-support were omitted) where we clustered athletes into teams using the TYPE = complex command, which allows controlling for the nested structure of the data (Muthén & Muthén, 2017) as athletes were nested within teams. By ignoring this nested structure, standard errors might be inflated, increasing the possibility of a Type 1 error (for more information, see McNeish, et al., 2017; Muthén & Muthén, 2017). It should be noted that we included perceived need-support as an observed variable as otherwise there were more parameters than clusters. This model still provided a good fit (χ²=  1.33 df = 3; p = .721). The positive cross-lagged effects from need-support to resilience remained the same, thus further supporting Hypothesis 2a (perceived need-supportive coaching behaviors positively predict team resilience).

2 Similar to the note above, we ran the RICLPM for this final model (where the pathways from resilience to perceived psychologically control were omitted) where we clustered athletes into teams using the TYPE = complex command. Again, this model provided a good fit (χ²=  3.81 df = 3; p = .284), further supporting Hypothesis 2b (perceived psychologically controlling coaching behaviours negatively predict team resilience).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Government of Flanders, Department of Sport under [grant number B/14197/02-IV2]; Vlaamse Overheid.