Do Leaders Actually Influence Sports Performance? An Integrated Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The precise nature of the leadership-sport performance relationship remains unclear. Furthermore, understanding of how leadership effects might differ across coach and athlete leaders or across team and individual performance is currently limited. To address these issues, we conducted an integrated systematic and meta-analytical review (50 studies, 17,158 athletes) to quantify differences between coach and athlete leaders and examine potential moderator variables. Results revealed a significant yet small positive relationship between leadership and performance (r = .21; Hedges' g = 0.44). Significantly stronger relationships emerged for team captains (r = .34) with team performance than coaches (r = .18) and informal athlete leaders (r = .15). Moreover, significantly larger effect sizes were yielded for authentic (r = .44) and transformational (r = .33) compared with social identity leadership (r = .19). In summary, both coaches and athletes possess the potential to be effective leaders who influence both team and individual performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.029 | 0.089 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.013 | 0.025 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".