The impact of transformational leadership on collegiate athlete performance

This study investigates the relationship between transformational leadership and collegiate athlete performance. In an organizational setting, performance is impacted by leadership, but different types of leadership, exhibited by supervisors, affects the level of performance differently (Lee & Ding, 2020; Mehta, Dubinsky, & Anderson, 2003). Instead of this research focusing on an organizational context, it is applied in a sports context. We hypothesized transformational leadership will be correlated to performance, and cohesion and motivation will be significant mediators in the relationship. To understand this phenomenon, a Qualtrics survey was developed to collect information from past athletes. The survey was distributed on Amazon's MTurk online service. Each participant was asked to complete an informed consent form, demographic questions, and six other questionnaires. The results of this study found evidence that transformational leadership is positively related to individual (r = 0.61) and team performance (r = 0.58). Additionally, intrinsic motivation partially mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and individual performance. Cohesion, as a mediator, did not have a significant indirect effect on individual performance (b = 2.40e-4, p > .05). The same results were found when team performance was used as the dependent variable. This means cohesion is not a significant mediator in this study. The null effects regarding cohesion could be due to the participants' not being active current participants in sports. Future studies should use a current collegiate athletes sample and investigate collegiate athletes' preferences and attitudes toward a coach's leadership style.