Tränares makt över spelare i lagidrotter - sett ur French och Ravens maktbasteori

Abstract

Coaches power over athletes in team sports – As seen from French and Ravens theory of power bases. Keywords:team sports, coaching, social power, coaching effectiveness, structural equations modeling. The coach has a central role in sport and is assumed to be of great importance for athletes' performance and experiences of their sport participation. Even so, the scientific knowledge available about what enables coaches’ great influence is scarce. The overall aim of this thesis was to investigate coaches’ power over players in team sports to shed some light on this issue. As a theoretical framework French and Ravens theory of power bases was used. The main analyses were built on data from 820 athletes from three different team sports (football, handball and floorball). In the statistical analyses, structural equation modeling was employed. Consistent with previous research in the area, the results showed that the athletes primarily attributed expert and legitimate power as reasons for complying with their coach. Different characteristics of the athletes were shown to influence what or which power bases they attributed. Here the age of the athletes were the characteristic that stood out as the most important characteristic. Sex, player status and length of the relationship with the coach were also shown to predict power base attributions. The results further showed that attributions of power bases were strongly associated with coaching effectiveness (CE), explaining between 12 % and 50 % of the variation in the effectiveness criteria used. The individual bases were shown to have varying relationships with CE. Referent and coercive power were found to be both positively and negatively related; legitimate power was only negatively related; expert power was consistently positively related; and reward power had no unique statistically significant relationship with any of the effectiveness criteria used. In sum, attributions of coaches’ bases of power seems to be of great importance in understanding the influence of team sport coaches, and thereby also for understanding athletes’ performance and experience of their sport participation.