Gathering strength in numbers: Higher team cohesion leads to greater precompetitive excitement through enhanced social support, self-efficacy, and coping prospects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sport competitions are inherently stressful and whether this stress is adaptive depends in part on athletes’ perceived coping prospects and emotions regarding these competitions. The purpose of this study was to examine if athletes’ social environment—namely high and low levels of task and social cohesion—causally lead to differences in precompetitive excitement and anxiety, and whether precompetitive secondary appraisal, perceived available social support, and competition-specific self-efficacy mediated this relationship. In this study, 170 currently competing members of task-interdependent sport teams participated in a 2 (task cohesion) x 2 (social cohesion) between-subjects experiment in which perceptions of team cohesion were manipulated via written scenarios. Results showed main effects of high vs. low task cohesion leading to greater excitement, perceived coping prospects (i.e., secondary appraisal), esteem and informational support. High vs. low social cohesion showed the same main effects and also led to greater emotional and tangible support; task cohesion influenced tangible support only under low social cohesion. Neither type of cohesion affected anxiety. Yet, the links from cohesion to excitement were mediated by social support, self-efficacy, and secondary appraisal as expected. This demonstrates that team cohesion, especially its social facet, may be utilized as a way to foster members’ positive perceptions and experiences in response to competitive stress. These findings underscore the importance of athletes’ social environments for their successful adaptation and encourage consultants, coaches, and teams to strategically develop social cohesion as a resource instead of neglecting it as tangential and potentially detrimental to task performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 teacher head, 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".