Cohesion

Hello, I'm Dr Max later.

I mean, it's always your professor of sport and exercise psychology.

Based at Stanford University.

My research focuses on the psychology of leadership and team functioning,

and in today's course, we're going to be focusing on performing with others.

This course is split into five lectures in the first lecture.

We're going to focus on cohesion in the second lecture,

will focus on social identity in the third Lecture,

Will focus on leadership in the fourth Lecture will focus on

a particular research study by Smith and colleagues from 1979.

And the final lecture will be focusing

on strategies to improve team performance and

improve performing with others in terms of how we can do that with athletes

and sports teams.

So to begin with,

then it's always helpful to think about the broader

context and think about what we mean by teams.

So performing as part of a team within sport is very

different to performing as an individual athletes in individual sports,

some of the elements that make it unique in terms of the

context reflect the fact that we have multiple roles within a team.

We might have individual goals but we also

have team goals that we're trying to achieve.

Also,

it's multifaceted in the sense that we need

to be able to communicate well with one another

to perform to our best and achieve the goals that we want to collectively as a team.

So this makes team sport unique compared to individual sport.

One of the predominant models of understanding performing with others and

in particular understanding group dynamics is the model of cohesion.

Cohesion was proposed by Albert Karen,

and in particular is defined as the a dynamic process,

which is reflected in the tendency for a group to stick

together and remain united in the pursuit of goals and objectives.

This was proposed in the 19 eighties,

and I think it's interesting when you think

about the definition in terms of cohesion.

The first thing is it's dynamic, so we can change over time.

One week we can be cohesive and together the next week, perhaps not as a sport team,

it's a process so we can make it better by working on it.

There's always a goal that we're trying to achieve as a sport team,

and also I think when you think about the definition.

Yes, it applies to sport and we can apply in sport.

But it also has broader connotations as well.

We could apply this to any group in any setting. Really,

If you think a little bit more about cohesion,

it split into two independent dimensions.

Task, cohesion and social cohesion.

So task cohesion is to do with how well

a group comes together to perform a particular task.

So that might be a netball team, for example,

performing an attack to try and score points in the netball match, with

a basketball team performing together defensively to stop

the opposition's growing a basket in basketball.

So it's all about achieving a task together.

The second dimension

is known as social cohesion,

and this is to do with the relational factors and how well the team get on together,

away from the court or away from the pitch.

So how many friends do we have on the team that we see outside of the sport?

And how are those relationships between individuals within the sport team

next?

These two dimensions both task and social cohesion,

are split further into two further dimensions.

Attraction to the group and group integration

This leaves us with four independent dimensions to do with cohesion.

So have attraction to the group Task group Integration task,

attraction to the group social

and group integration social.

And these are the four dimensions that make up the model

of cohesion.

Now,

when we're thinking about cohesion and particularly working

with sport teams to develop the cohesion,

it's worth thinking about what predicts how cohesive support team is.

And Albert,

Karen and colleagues came up with four determinants of cohesion

in their model four areas that they were interested in.

That they thought had a powerful impact on how cohesive a team were.

The first is environmental factors, so this can be due to do with the facilities,

the ground, a dressing room.

Second, his team factors.

So this can be to do with how well the team gets

home with one another when there is any conflict within the team,

for example,

the third is personal factors.

So this is to do with perhaps the personalities

within the team have any clashes of personalities.

How many introverts and extroverts do we have within the team,

and then the final factor that determines cohesion is leadership factors,

so do we have a strong leadership within the team?

How many leaders do we have?

What type of leadership do they show in day to day training and competitions?

So these are the four determinants of cohesion

following on from the four determinants of cohesion.

We can also start to think about how we can measure cohesion in the literature.

There is a specific measure that can assess sport teams cohesion.

It's known as a group environment questionnaire or the G. Q.

It's proposed in the 19 eighties by Albert Karen and colleagues.

The G Q is an 18 item scale that

measures the four independent dimensions of cohesion is really

useful to be able to provide us with a

sense of how cohesive this particular sport team is

off the back of the model of cohesion and how to measure cohesion in terms of the G,

Q literature has started to look at how cohesion is linked to performance.

Is it the case that more cohesive teams perform better or not?

Broadly,

we find in the literature that more cohesive teams do indeed perform better.

The effect is relatively small,

and we tend to find a larger effect in female teams compared to male teams.

But still, this has broad implications for coaches,

for leaders and for sports psychologists working in support.

Because if we can

produce cohesive teams and work on developing cohesion with our sport teams,

it's likely that we may be able to improve

their performance on the pitch or on the court.

In this lecture, we focused on performing with others,

in particular the model of cohesion and in the next

lecture will be focusing on the social identity approach.