Craig Pickering

Sports Science Quarterly – Q3 2026

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Every quarter we take a deep dive into the latest research in sports science. In this edition we look at the latest research on factors influencing team vs. individual performance more, examples of turning coaching failure into future success, and how to implement pressure training.

As always, the full Sports Science Quarterly is available exclusively to HMMR Plus Members. You can browse the past topics on our archive page. The first topic below is free to everyone, but sign up now to read about all the latest research. To get an idea of what Sports Science Quarterly is all about, the April 2016 edition is available in its entirety for free.

This Quarter’s Topics

Factors influencing team performance

Quick Summary – Research shows that team performance is shaped less by individual ability and more by leadership style, communication, shared goals, adaptability, and supportive behaviours. Charismatic or transformational leaders who foster open feedback, shared values, and strong team identity tend to create environments where both staff and athletes perform better. While most findings come from associations rather than causal trials, the evidence consistently highlights that cultivating culture, communication, and collective orientation is critical to team success in elite sport.

As a coach or a performance support practitioner, typically you are working in some sort of team. These teams can be varied; a coach could form part of the wider performance team (including various sports science and sports medicine practitioners), or a team of coaches, or even a travelling team (e.g., to a World Championships). Within sport, we often consider what we can do to support the performance of the athlete, and, naturally within this, we focus on interventions that specifically focus on the athlete themselves. However, over recent years, research has started to focus on the environment in which athletes (and others—including coaches and performance support staff members) find themselves in, and the significant influence this can have on their performance. This, in turn, has led to a greater focus on how teams perform, as a collection of individuals, towards a common goal. Part of my role at Australian Athletics is to act as Team Leader for key pathway competitions—in doing this, I place a large focus on ensuring that staff members can function effectively as a team, so that we can be best placed to support athletes in delivering their best performance. As a result, research exploring the dynamics of team function and performance within elite sport settings is becoming increasingly important—and was the subject of a recent paper published in Sports Medicine. 

Here, the authors undertook a systematic review and meta-analysis on papers published between 2000 and 2021 and exploring team performance in an objective manner. In total, 46 studies met the criteria for inclusion. These studies can from a variety of domains, including business (n = 12), sport (n = 8), military (n = 6), health and social care (n = 3), engineering (n = 2), and education (n = 1), as well as 14 papers that explored team performance across multiple sectors. From the research, the authors were able to identify four key domains for effective teamwork:

  • Team leadership roles and styles – the ability to direct and coordinate the activities of other members of team, assess overall performance, assign tasks, and develop team knowledge, skills and abilities. 
  • Performance goals and feedback – the ability to develop a common understanding of the team environment, and then apply appropriate strategies to accurately monitor performance. 
  • Team orientation and adaptability – the ability to adjust strategies based on information gathered from the environment through the use of supportive team behaviour, and (re)allocation of key resources. 
  • Supportive team behaviour – the ability to anticipate other team member’s needs through accurate knowledge of their responsibilities. 

When looking at team leadership roles and styles, the analysed studies highlighted the role of the team leader as being pivotal for effective team function. This is because leaders have ultimate responsibility for team members, as well as the direction of team activities and processes. Successful leaders tend to display a higher cognitive ability, conscientiousness, and charisma. In terms of leadership styles, both charismatic and transformational leadership styles were shown to positively change the values and priorities of team members, and to motivate them to perform beyond their expectations. A leadership style that plays to hierarchy—i.e., where the overall leader makes all the decisions, and lower levels just follow their directions—has a negative overall effect on performance. The relationship between team members is also influenced by the leadership style of the team leader; teams generally perform better when team leaders are highly involved in the team’s communication and workflow networks. Overall, leaders act as influential role models; their behaviours directly shape task-related team processes, which in turn can positively affect team performance. 

From a performance goals and feedback perspective, the studies published to date demonstrate that the use of feedback (both in the form of negative feedback and positive reinforcement) can provide team members with the opportunity to learn how to work collaboratively, which in turn drives the setting of common team goals, the shaping of overall culture and attitude, and an improved understanding of performance standards. As such, leaders should facilitate open communication and feedback around strengths and weaknesses, and be aware that poor communication, at all levels, was associated with dysfunctional relationships within the team. Some research has indicated that football teams with more effective communication within the medical team, and between the medical team and the head coach, have fewer injuries overall—highlighting the importance of effective communication at all levels. Low quality communication likely increases the risk of misunderstandings, promotes one-sided decision making, and leads to higher levels of stress. 

In exploring supportive team behaviour, the research highlighted how teams with strong group identity, communication, and structural cohesion were better equipped to deal with the potentially adverse effects of conflict and team failure. As a result, team members should aim to engage in cooperative behaviours as much as possible. In addition, a shared set of values that inform a group’s behaviour (a definition of team culture) is considered to be one of the most prominent contributors to the success of a team. 

Team orientation refers to how team members learn, store, use, and coordinate their knowledge to accomplish key team and organisational goals. An interesting finding was that intrapersonal functional diversity (where each team member’s experience is distributed across a number of domains, such as operations, logistics, and leadership) is more positively associated with information sharing and collective group performance than if it was focused on one specific functional area. In addition, the results highlighted the positive influence on effective team processes and team culture on driving team performance. 

When considering the research in this area, it’s important to keep a couple of things in mind. Firstly, the research is not solely from sport—it is from a number of different domains, and this can potentially limit its applicability to sport. Secondly, in science the gold standard of research is the randomised controlled trial (RCT); these trials allow us to determine what is causal, and what isn’t. Research in the area of team dynamics is not, as of yet, at the point of utilising RCTs, so these papers are focusing on associations, as opposed to causations. Whilst an association can be indicative of causation, it isn’t always. This is to say that reporting on what happens in a high performing team doesn’t necessary mean that, by implementing those behaviours yourself, you’ll get a high performing team (but you might). More broadly, this particular study is one of very few scoping reviews mapping empirically-tested performance predictors from non-sport sectors (e.g., business, healthcare, and the military) to support teams within sport. This is an important step; previous work has tended to focus on athlete outcomes, which are obviously a key variable of interest (they are what win medals after all), but work of that nature tends to ignore the supporting architecture around athletes—often something which elite sports program can actually influence effectively. Other work in this area from within sport has focused on organisational psychology (like this paper, for example), whilst research from other domains has begun to explore what key factors influence overall teamwork. 

In summary, for readers who are responsible for leading a team, it’s clear that a consideration of the above factors will go a long to ensure that team can function effectively. Carefully considering and cultivating a leadership style—ideally one that is charismatic or transformational—is supported in the literature as being performance enhancing, as is the development of a strong team culture (through shared values and behaviours), the ability to set team goals, and the ability to give (and receive) constructive feedback. Given that we now consider coaches and performance support staff as performers in their own right, we should ensure we’re setting the foundations to enable them to perform to the best of their abilities; getting this right ensures that our athletes are given the best chance possible of success.

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