Peer Leadership in Sport: Links with Friendship, Peer Acceptance, Psychological Characteristics, and Athletic Ability

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to replicate and extend the work of CitationGlenn and Horn (1993) by examining relationships between peer leadership in sport and social, psychological, and ability characteristics. The sample consisted of 71 female and 67 male high-school soccer players and their coaches. Players completed questionnaires measuring social (peer acceptance and friendship quality) and psychological (perceived competence, instrumentality, and expressiveness) variables, and leadership behavior for self and teammates. Coaches assessed each player on leadership behavior and soccer ability. For female athletes, all psychosocial variables were predictive of self-ratings of leadership, while coach and teammate ratings were related to ability only. For male athletes, all psychosocial variables and ability were related to self-ratings and teammate ratings of peer leadership, while coaches' ratings were related primarily to ability. These results are discussed with regard to social exchange theory and commonalities among peer relationship variables (acceptance, friendship, leadership).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 109 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.