The Development of shared leadership in youth football teams

Shared leadership development in sport is at the beginning of its theoretical (and practical) development. This thesis therefore has been positioned at the exploratory end of the spectrum and focusses on how to develop shared leadership in youth team sports. Although leadership studies are relatively new as an academic discipline, leadership as a topic has been studied for thousands of years (Bolden, Hawkins, Gosling & Taylor, 2011). Starting in the early – to mid- twentieth century, initial research in the field of leadership endeavoured to explain leadership as a property of leaders. However, the presence of any or all of these traits does and did not make someone a leader, nor did the absence excluded that person from being the leader. In the years following, several theories were developed and various approaches to leadership can be identified with sometimes a focus on the leader or follower, the interactive process between them, and/or the influence of the context. Recent leadership theory shifted the focus from the leader to leadership, emphasising the shared social process to which many people contribute (Pearce & conger, 2003). While thousands of studies have been conducted on leadership delivered by adults, leadership by youth has gained less attention as theoretical or research subject and therefore remains an underexplored topic in the broader leadership literature. This also applies to the development of leadership in the context of sport and physical activity in general and the development of shared leadership in particular. Therefore the purpose of this thesis is to explore how shared leadership can be developed in youth team sport, and within competitive youth football in particular.The first study focussed on the development of shared leadership as a fundamental concept in youth team sport. Shared leadership according to Van Vugt & Ahuja (2011) concerns a human phenomenon for complex cooperation as a response to the need for collective action. For this study, shared leadership is explained as “a dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals or both” (Pearce & Conger, 2003). Based on literature review, the P-model of Hopman and Van den Berg (2015) was adapted and the different determinants of how to develop youth leadership and shared leadership were identified. To develop shared leadership in youth sport it matters to approach leadership holistically by taking the 5 Ps (precondition, person, process, position and purpose) and its context into consideration simultaneously. The model includes the various historical approaches to leadership and the influence of the context.The second study analysed natural leadership as an early form of shared leadership in a real sporting context. The objective was to gain new insights that contribute towards theoretical advancement and practical applications in the field of youth leadership development. Research was conducted into the practical value of the Evolutionary Leadership Theory (ELT) of Van Vugt and Ahuja (2011) at the micro (team) level in youth football. In our study we used the ELT with its perspectives on the origins of leadership in humans (Van Vugt, 2006) where the leadership is executed specifically for the purpose of solving coordination problems. A natural leadership instrument, a variant of the Six Natural Leaders Questionnaire of Van Vugt and Ahuja (2011) was tested in the context of elite youth football. Making use of an exploratory factor analysis the study results delivered three rather than the six different leadership factors that make up the instrument of Van Vugt and Ahuja (2011). The factors were labelled as ‘the communicating leader’, ‘the resourceful leader’, and ‘the competitive leader’.In the third study, an instrument to measure shared leadership in youth elite football teams was developed. Given the complexity of the phenomenon of shared leadership and the infancy of the field of study, research on methods to assess shared leadership are lagging (Pearce & Conger, 2003). The instrument to measure shared leadership behaviour among young football players was based on two scales: ‘Shared Professional Leadership Inventory for Team’ (SPLIT) by Grille & Kauffeld (2015) and the ‘Six Natural Leaders Questionnaire’ (SNLQ) originally developed by Van Vugt and Ahuja (2011) but further adapted to the context of youth football by Van Dalfsen, Van Hoecke and Westerbeek (2016). The scales originate from shared leadership and youth sport leadership literature. Confirmatory factor analysis delivered three factors: ‘steering’, ‘coaching’ and ‘intervening’, and the researchers named the scale the ‘Youth Athlete Shared Leadership’ (YASL) in football. Theoretically, this study contributed to closing the gap regarding the identification of reliable and valid measures to assess shared leadership in sport. Practically this PhD contributed to providing coaches and team members insights into which persons can be granted the leadership position.The fourth study explored football coaches’ views on how to develop shared leadership capacity in youth team sport. Because of its explorative character with a selective sample of ten respondents, this qualitative study did not deliver outcomes that should be generalised. Using coaches’ views will help to understand current knowledge about how youth leadership can be activated in the context of a football club. A direct content analysis was used to examine coaches’ view on shared leadership capacity and its development in elite youth football in the Netherlands. The leadership framework delivered an important insight into the micro context of leadership development from a coach perspective. Based on the results of the study it can be argued that next to the micro-level of team sport also the meso-, and -macro level should be taken into account. Youth shared leadership in most of the teams was not developed on a consistent and purposeful basis. Some teams however, made unintentionally use of shared leadership principles by, for example, choosing more than one leader during one match or involving youth in the decision-making processes. In general we can conclude that developing leadership styles at a young age should be more straightforward and simple in contrast to adult leadership development. Three leadership styles (individual, distributed and shared) in particular environments can be distinguished. The position of leader in shared leadership is not predetermined and both formal and informal leaders (the coach, the team captain and/or players) are very important. An essential part of integrating shared leadership in team sport, concerns the leader follower interactions where group members think about their own individual contribution as part of the team accomplishments. Youth therefore have to move away from a top down leadership approach to a system of distributing leadership to one or more leaders. Next to the micro-level within teams, we propose that the meso-, and macro level can be taken into consideration for the development of youth leadership. Meaningful leadership development in youth sport can only be deployed in sport clubs if all stakeholders involved can see the usefulness of it and if youth is encouraged not only to think of ‘what they do’, or ‘how they do it’ but also ‘why they do things’. Only then youth leadership development can be used in further personal development with a lifelong impact.