Sport Psychology Skills

 To understand the differences between teams and groups  To explore group roles and group norms  Review social phenomenon related to group processes

 A team is a group of people  A group of people are not always a team  A team is a group of people who must interact with eachother to accomplish shared objectives  Becoming a team is an evolutionary process

 FORMING- team members familiarise themselves with eachother, high dependance on leader  STORMING- potential in-group conflicts as team members vie for positions and roles  NORMING – Sense of unity established, solidarity and cooperation, team members work together to achieve common goals  PERFORMING- focus on achieving goals, more strategically aware, energy channelling into team success (Tuckman, 1965)

 A role consists of a set of behaviours required or expected of the person occupying a certain position in the group  Roles can be formal and informal  Role clarity and role acceptance are vital  Interpretation of roles  Examples?

 A norm is a level of performance, pattern of behaviour, or belief  Can either be formally established or informally developed by group  Each norm will carry specific expectations and behaviours that members are expected to follow  Examples?

 Coaches role is to ‘get the team playing together’  A team of the best players rarely produces the best performance  A good team is more than the sum of its parts  Examples?  But where does the rest come from?

Actual Productivity = Potential Productivity – Losses due to faulty group processes  Potential Productivity- a teams best possible performance given each player’s ability  Faulty group processes- ◦ Motivation losses (not giving 100%) ◦ Coordination losses (timing off, ineffective strategies, communication

 Studied individual performance indicators for four sports: baseball, tennis, basketball & football)  Compared stats to team success  Found strongest relationship between team effectiveness and individual performance in baseball  Weakness relationship found in basketball  Why do you think this is?

“The phenomenon by which individual performance decreases as the number of people in the group increases is known as the Ringlemann effect”

 Unpublished Rope pulling task study (cited by Levinger et al., 1974)  Individual rope pulling performance decreased as the number of team members increased  Findings replicated by Ingham et al. (1974)- performance dropped to 85%  Also in clapping and shouting tasks  Ingham et al. (1974) identified that this was due to a lack of motivation, not coordination

Social Loafing occurs when individuals within a group or team put forth less than 100% effort due to losses in motivation

 Sucker effect- Don’t want to be the sucker! Believes that teammates are less motivated  Minimising strategy- May feel ‘lost in the crowd’ and won’t receive fair share of positive consequences  Allocation strategy- Don not need to try hard as teammates will pick up the slack  Free rider- Believe that they can hide in the crowd and therefore avoid the negative consequences