Summary:
One important factor for team sports is cohesion, which Carron (1982) has defined as a dynamic process which is reflected in the tendency for a group to stick together and remain united in the pursuit of its goals. Purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship of cohesion - performance in soccer, and to reveal the factors which are associated with cohesion. Age, experience, residence time in the club, position, expectations, total participations in season’s matches, perceptions of team and individual success, are among the factors related to cohesion and examined in this study. Overall, survey participants were 403 male soccer players, from 16 teams of amateur leagues of Attica and Arcadia aged 13 to 38 years (Μ= 21,91), of whom 173 completed all the items of the questionnaires to all loans. The cohesion was evaluated at the start of the preparation, at the start of the season, in the middle and the end of the season with a customized version of the Greek population of the Group Environment Questionnaire (Aggelonidis, 1995; Carron, Widmeyer, & Brawley, 1985). The performance was evaluated at the start of the season, in the middle and the end of the season, by the league table (rating and ranking). The remaining variables were measured with improvised scales. According to the results it was found that cohesion relates with expectations, total participations in season’s matches, residence time in the club and perceptions of team and individual success. Finally, regarding the relationship between cohesion - performance, it was found that both cohesion (task and social cohesion) and performance contribute to this relationship, with cohesion affecting more the team’s performance than team’s performance the cohesion.
Keywords:
Cohesion, soccer/football, team, performance, perceived success.
