Transformational leadership behaviour in sport

Abstract

First paragraph: Transformational leadership is often cited as the most widely used theory of leadership in the organisational psychology domain (cf. Lowe and Gardner, 2000). Indeed, Lowe and Gardner reported that one third of the research appearing in The Leadership Quarterly between 1990 and 2000 was about transformational or charismatic leadership. We conducted a Web of Knowledge search using ‘Transformational leadership’ in the title term, which produced 824 citations with 90 of those having a 2013 publication date. The same search for other prominent leadership theories such as path goal theory, servant leadership, and leader-member- exchange, produced 28, 122, and 303 articles respectively. There have also been 7 meta-analyses conducted on transformational leadership that have examined transformational leadership in relation to factors such as, leader effectiveness ( Judge and Piccolo, 2004; Lowe et al., 1996), gender (Eagly et al., 2003), personality (Bono and Judge, 2004), and school leadership (Chin, 2007; Leithwood and Sun, 2012). Transformational leadership has been shown to predict a wide range of individual and organisational outcomes across a diverse range of contexts including military (Bass et al., 2003; Dvir et al., 2002; Hardy et al., 2010), business (Barling et al., 1996; Judge and Piccolo, 2004; Kelloway et al., 2012), education (Chin, 2007; Leithwood and Sun, 2012), public sector (Rafferty and Griffin, 2004), parenting (Morton et al., 2011), and sport (Arthur et al., 2011; Callow et al., 2009; Charbonneau et al., 2001; Rowold, 2006; Smith et al., 2012). There has also been a number of field- based experimental studies that have been conducted in a number of different contexts including business (Arthur and Hardy, 2014; Barling et al., 1996; Mullen and Kelloway, 2009), military (Dvir et al., 2002; Hardy et al., 2010), teaching (Beauchamp et al., 2011), and sport (Vella et al., 2013a). Clearly transformational leadership has been an influential theory in the leadership literature. However, transformational leadership has received relatively little attention in the sport psychology and exercise literature (cf. Hoption et al., 2008). Indeed, in our review we located only 14 empirical research papers that examined transformational leadership in a sport setting (when we refer to sport we are referring to coach, captain, peer, or exercise leaders).