Friday, April 3, 2009
Grading of Essays by the University
Currently, my grades, as of 31 Mar 2009, for the essays are as follows:
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Effects of Coaches’ Emotional Competencies on Athletes’ Sporting Performance - Literature Research
Introduction
Goleman (1998) defines emotional intelligence as the capacity for recognising one’s own feelings and those of others for the purpose of managing our emotions and the emotions of others whom we are related with. As a national sailing coach in Singapore, this is of utmost interest to me as much has been written about the importance of coach-athlete relationship and the factors influencing its quality (motivation, Jowett (2008); leadership styles, Trzaskoma-Bicserdy, Bognar, Revesz and Geczi, (2007)), and its ultimate impact on the athlete’s performance (Cross and Lyle, 1999). It is surprising to learn that coaches are not familiar with the concepts of emotional intelligence and they largely operate to maintain unilateral control or power over the athletes (Drury, 2007). If the relationship between the coach and athlete is so important, how does emotional intelligence of the coach supports his athletes in sustaining a positive coach-athlete relationship and in creating opportunities for better performance in his athletes. In another words, what is the impact of the coach’s emotional competencies on the career success of his athletes?
Annotated Citations
During the keyword search for literature that may shed light into my research interest, 36 articles are found and seven of these are discarded as they are later found not relevant. The reminder is grouped into seven broad categories. These categories include Emotional Intelligence and Performance, Emotional Intelligence and Coaching, Coach-Athlete Relationship and Performance, Emotional Intelligence and Definitions, Use of Emotions in Sports, Application of Emotional Intelligence in Coaching, and Impact of Coach’s Emotion on Performance of Athletes. The list of 29 articles is presented in the bibliography.
The following five articles are selected from five of these categories and they represent the more influential studies and record the most recent development in their respective fields. Collectively, they provide five different perspectives, each adding to enlarge my understanding of emotional intelligence, and its impact of the coach on his athletes. An extended critical review of the fifth article can be found towards the end of this article.
Dries, N. and Pepermans, R. (2007). Using emotional intelligence to identify high potential: a metagcompetency perspective. Leadership and Organisation Development Journal, 28(8), 749-770.
The authors have observed that the competency frameworks used by organisations to identify their high potentials is derived from the competencies of past and current cohort of successful executives rather from those competencies of future executives dealing with future challenges. They argue that the inclusion of emotional intelligence components into the frameworks may re-orientate this approach of identifying high potentials and enhancing the job performance and commitment of these future executives in the organisations.
They have proposed the use of Emotional Intelligence Personal Factor Model (Dulewicz and Higgs, 2004) and Meta-competency Model of Continuous Learning (Briscoe and Hall, 1999) as the key concepts underlining their study. They believe that by uncovering the executives’ meta-competencies, which is their ability to self-correct in response to new and unfamiliar demand of the environment and to self-reflect and assimilate what is learnt; executive potential could be better predicted and managed.
The research, which examines the emotional intelligence-high potential link, and the relationships between job performance and career commitment, involved 102 managers from three organisations from the financial, insurance and telecom industries in Belgium.
While assertiveness, independence, optimism and a few other elements appear to be ‘covert’ high-potential identification criteria, it is problematic to generalise these across the population because of the small sample size and the self-enhancement bias fostered by the self-reporting nature of the instrument used, which may skew the findings. These limitations are acknowledged by the authors.
The research was carried out in a few industries and in a Dutch-speaking region. It is also difficult to discount the possibility of industry-specific influences and cross-cultural differences from the findings. Still, the research provides a gleam into the possibility of strengthening the current approach of high potential identification with the knowledge from emotional intelligence.
The key weakness in this study is in the instrument – EQ-i. It was used in the study as a proxy for Briscoe and Hall’s meta-competency model (1999), and the authors have acknowledged that the correspondences between the elements in the instrument and those in the model are tentative and they ‘merely serve to demonstrate the probability of a connection between emotional intelligence and the potential for continuous learning’.
There is a discussion of EQ-i in the article which includes a segment on its criticisms. A similar discussion was presented by Livingstone (2001) where she queried about EQ-i measures and what they predict. Her study suggests that EQ-i greatly co-relates with the Big Five personality dimensions and accounts for both job and life satisfaction after controlling for the influence of demographic characteristics and personality. This may further suggest an inherent validity problem in the findings of Dries and Peperman’s research because they may not have been aware of this limitation and have not conducted the controls.
This study seems to indicate that the emotional intelligence of the coach may not have a significant impact on the performance of his athlete if the athlete has the ability to learn from past experience and to control his stress level effectively. These metacompetencies prevent the athlete from having negative effects on his sailing career-related attitudes. This awareness is important in my research because ignoring it may inject errors into my findings – coaches’ impact on their athletes’ performance may be misread because their athletes are able to negate the effects on their own.
There could be a certain degree of ‘us-verses-them’ sensitivity in the research as without the confidentiality, the job morale and commitment of those classified as non-high potential may severely be affected. The authors had deployed a series of measures to protect the identities of those involved in the study.
Depape, A.R., Hakim-Larson, J., Voelker, S., Page, S. and Jackson, S.L. (2006). Self-talk and emotional intelligence in University students. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 38(3), 250-260.
In this study, the authors bring two bodies of knowledge together – self-talk and emotional intelligence. Self-talk is the reproduction of the perspectives of others in an individual’s private speech. It is a strategy one adopts to solve his social and emotional problems, and in the process develops his self-concept.
In this definition, the authors uncovered a bridge that may link these two concepts. The literature indicates that inner speech positively correlates to private and public self-consciousness, and the authors believe that by attending to these inner thoughts frequently, one is more able to attain higher self-awareness and better at regulating one’s emotions. The authors conclude that certain aspects of self-talk are subsets of emotional intelligence since it includes the ability to recognise, express, regulate and harness emotions, which are terms familiar to self-talk enthusiasts. For these, they want to examine this link and argue that when one engages more in self-talk, he tends to exhibit higher levels of emotional intelligence. They also want to include developmental and gender differences in emotional intelligence into the study.
The study involved 126 participants between the ages of 18 to 42. They were recruited through the Psychological Department of a mid-size, ethnically diverse University in southern Ontario, Canada.
The research empirically suggests that some aspects of self-talk are found to predict emotional intelligence but there are several limitations in the study that make it difficult to extrapolate the findings to the general population.
Besides working with a small sample size, the research is too broadly based. The ages of the participants are too dispersed and ethnically they are too diverse. There could be over-reporting because of the self-reporting nature of some of the instruments used and credit points were awarded to participants. The possibility of under-reporting could not be discounted since previous studies highlighted that participants may not be aware that they were engaged in self-talk (Winster and Naglieri, 2003). In addition, there seems to be a problem with the triangulation carried out in the study. The global Self-Verbalisation Questionnaire score predicted emotional intelligence but not the Self-Talk Scale. This calls into question the reliability of these instruments and the authors’ understanding of what they truly measure (Livingstone, 2001).
One key weakness the authors did not acknowledge is that they have not included the developmental differences in self-talk - practices, familiarity, social setting and task difficulties, which they mentioned in their literature research, in the study. One is not sure how the findings may change when these were factored into the design of the research.
This research reminds me of an article written by Tischler, Biberman and McKeage (2002). They have attempted to link spirituality and emotional intelligence to workplace performance. They suggest that, while the concepts begin from separate areas, they appear to lead to similar attitudes, behaviours and skills. It is currently unknown if empirical studies have been conducted to establish this link but this shows that there is interest in several quarters in the academia to link their field of study to emotional intelligence.
Depape et al.’s article is relevant to my sphere of study because it suggests self-talk is most likely to occur when there is a difference in perspective within one self and between one self and others. Self-awareness is enhanced when it is accompanied by positive affect and constricted when accompanied by negative affect (Morin, 1993). This provides the first strong indication from the literature I have gathered that the emotional intelligence of the coach could affect the performance of his athletes.
There are several questions that kept occurring in my mind as I read this article – Is there harm in making the participants aware that they are engaging in self-talk? Would this awareness makes self-talk ineffective to the participant as a strategy in dealing with complex tasks? These are not addressed by the authors. Also, there could be ethical issues with not informing the participants of the purpose of the research before administering the instruments.
Saury, J. and Durand, M. (1998). On-site study of coaching in sailing. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 69(3), 254-266.
The authors believe that the coaching methods used during training are bounded by a specific set of constraints. These constraints are defined by the task and its range of possible and acceptable work strategies, and by the coach’s behaviours, diversity of operating strategies he possesses, and his knowledge of the sport. Given the task and its constraints, the coach has to use all his means to create the appropriate physical and social conditions to achieve the training objectives and for helping his athletes reach their performance goals.
The authors see this as an important study because it directly relates to the athlete’s performance in the sport, and improving this body of knowledge ensures the design of better reason-based coaching methods and schemes for educating and licensing current and future coaches. They have also observed that there were no studies specifically oriented towards describing the constraints inherent in the coaching activity.
They argue for the study of expert coaches recognised as most effective in their field (Martens, 1987) and further state their suspicion that sailing coaches face a unique set of constraints that is different in other sports.
This was a study to analyse the practical knowledge of five expert sailing coaches of the French team preparing for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics Games.
The study has uncovered a set of complex rules that govern the design of coaching activities. However, there are some challenges in generalising these, even in the sailing community. Besides the small sample size, the participants were not randomly selected. As the participants were all male, based in France and were coaches to Olympians, the findings may be valid for coaches sharing a similar space in this universe.
Perhaps the biggest weakness found in this article is that the study is mainly carried out through observations and recalls. As the training sessions took about 3 to 4 hours, fatigue may prevent proper observations and the lengthy duration may degrade recall accuracy. Also, due to weather, there were too much of variables in the study to constitute a valid observation and conducting the study through only five training sessions makes the internal validation more difficult.
In Perlini and Halverson (2006)’s study of emotional intelligence in the National Hockey League, they have found that years-since-draft is the strongest predictor of performance and draft rank is the weakest. This is interesting as it calls into question whether the degree of agility the coach exhibits in implementing coaching activities may be influenced by the years of experience his athletes had withjthe sport.
This is a study regarding coaching in sailing. It lists a set of constraints unique to sailing because of the ‘open’ nature of the sport. In an environment that is unpredictable and uncertain, tactical and strategy component play a important role in the athlete’s development for the sport, and the coach’s ability to ‘see things from the athlete’s point of view’ and ‘attempt to feel what the athlete feels’ suggest the importance of in-depth knowledge about the sport and high level of awareness and monitoring of the self and his athlete by the coach. This means emotional intelligence is an essential skill of the coach to enable joint control of the coach and his athlete over the training session and its coaching activities.
The coaches may not want to reveal much during the study because of the ‘secrets’ in their trade. Their discovery may affect the competitiveness of the coach when a job opening becomes available. This could be an ethical issue. Also, the athletes may be disturbed by the observations conducted by the researchers and these may impact their preparation for the Games.
Lafreniere, M. K., Jowett, S., Vallerand, R. J., Donahue, E. G. and Lorimer, R. (2008). Passion in Sport: On the quality of the coach-athlete relationship. Journal of Sports and Exercise Psychology, 30, 541-560.
The authors argue that harmonious passion of the coach in coaching may cause situational positive emotions that improve the quality of interpersonal relationship between the coach and the athlete, and increase their subjective well-being in the dyad. They also argue that obsessive passion creates no or opposite effects.
They reason that when the coach and his athlete are passionate about their sport, their love for the sport and devotion to reach higher levels of performance could lead them to develop positive coach-athlete relationship.
The authors recognise the dualistic nature of passion and believe that with harmonious passion, the coach autonomously internalise the coaching activity into his identity and become willing to accept it as important but will not allow this urge to come into conflict with other parts of his life. This desire to engage coaching freely and with openness is favourable in creating a positive experience (Hodgin & Knee, 2002) for his athletes.
They see obsessive passion the opposite of the harmonious one because the values and regulations related to coaching are only partially internalised in the identity (Vallerand, 2008). This creates uncontrollable urge to constantly engage in coaching activity at the expense of other parts of the coach’s life, which runs the risk of experiencing negative consequences during and after the passionate activity.
Two studies were conducted to investigate the role of passion in the quality of coach-athlete relationships. The first study consisted of 157 British college athletes comprising of about equal number of the two genders pegged at difference performance levels. The second study included 106 French-Canadian coaches with different levels of coaching certifications. There are only 6 female coaches in this study and both studies took participants from different popular sports.
While the two studies suggest that there is empirical evidence to support the arguments, the difficulties in generalising this across the population are many folds. Like in the previous three articles, the small sample size and the self-reporting nature of the instruments could introduce biases into the findings. At most, the findings may be applicable in Canada, and maybe only to the French-speaking parts of the country. Since this is a study about the coach and passion in coaching, the study should account for gender differences. This, the authors have acknowledged as a weakness in the studies.
It was not mentioned in the article but if my assumptions are correct, then it is strange to conduct two related studies with English-speaking students and a seemingly different group of French-speaking coaches. The studies could be strengthened if the coaches of these English-speaking athletes were invited to the study and the two studies were carried out with matching sport certifications of the coach and athlete performance levels.
The studies ruminate well with the essay on the role of the coach in the coach-athlete relationship (Short and Short, 2005). The authors talked about the coach needing to be the athlete’s friend and mentor and the positive effects of doing this role well on the feelings and satisfaction of the athlete with his coach.
These two studies are important to my research topic as they suggest mitigation elements that may affect the coach’s level of emotional intelligence on the performance of his athletes. If the coach has a harmonious passion for the sport, naturally he tends to create a positive relationship with his athletes. Based on these two studies, the opposite is true as well. So, the disposition of the coach has a say in the nature of his emotional competencies.
These studies may look like an exercise of conducting a 360-degree feedback on the coach by his athletes, which may be sensitive for the coach if his performance and remuneration is based on the quality of the coach-athlete relationship. It is not mentioned in the article how this was been addressed.
Rozell, E. J., Pettijohn, C. E. and Parker, R. S. (2002). An empirical evaluation of emotional intelligence: The impact on management development. The Journal of Management Development, 21(4), 272-289.
The authors wanted to use Goleman’s 137-item emotional quotient test as the basis for assessing the efficacy of using emotional intelligence as a predictor of academic success of 295 undergraduate business majors from a mid-western university in the United States of America. They believe that the emotional intelligence of these students may be positively correlated to their academic performance.
However, they suspected that there are variances in the results and argue that the differences in the emotional quotient scores between groups of business undergraduates may be attributed to the academic majors they had specialised in, the extra-curriculum activities they were affiliated to, and the student status they currently holding to. The study was set up to identify these driving differentiators as well as to validate the properties of Goleman’s five dimensions of emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1998) and the capacities of his measurement in identifying these properties.
They have provided four reasons for conducting this study. They hope that their effort could inform on the enhancements to current high potentials identification systems, appropriate management development programmes that human resource practitioners should create to train and develop these potentials, cultural differences in using emotional intelligence, and scale for measuring emotional intelligence of prospective managers in an expeditious manner. They argue that their findings could be extrapolated from academic success into workplace performance and career success of potential and current cohort of business executives.
There is no mention of the 137-item emotional quotient test in the references the authors have provided in their bibliography. Besides describing the five dimensions and 25 competencies, Goleman (1998) has not directly presented the instrument although there are clues that he had conducted some studies on his own or assisted in the conduct of some studies with other collaborators who had use his competencies as the framework for analysis. Also, this instrument is not included in Livingstone’s (2001) literature review when she set about to conduct an assessment of emotional intelligence measures. Given the importance of Goleman’s work and the frequency the dimensions are cited by other academics, I find the silence on the instrument strange and I am suspicious about the origins of this test.
Even if the emotional quotient test could be traced to Goleman, the factor analysis the authors had conducted on the 137 items may have caused validity problems in the instrument. The regrouping of these items into six factors, reducing these to five, and forcefully aligning them to Goleman’s five dimensions of emotional intelligence is problematic. With phrases like ‘maybe viewed’, ‘most closely related to’, ‘very similar to’, ‘seems to be’ and ‘perceived as being’ found in the same passage where the authors were describing the factor analysis process suggests that to a large extent, they are not fully convinced that there is a total fit between the emotional quotient test they had created and Goleman’s dimensions.
I have also found one important weakness in the instrument. On examination of Factor 4 – ‘Customer satisfaction focus’, of the authors’ emotional intelligence scale, I find the word - ‘customers’, appearing in five of the six statements in this category. I think this set of statements may not be respondent friendly as almost 80% of the participants are undergraduates and may not have work experience. Even for those who had accumulated hours of outside employment, they may not be in professions they were studying at the university at that moment. They may have difficulties relating to ‘customers’ in Factor 4. This may have skewed the findings and conclusions made about the emotional intelligence of accounting majors. Of course, using only 15 accounting majors to reach this conclusion is already a challenge.
Interestingly, the article mentions about Cooper and Sawaf’s (1997) EQ MAP test in the article. While it is not validated, it could be used for the study since it measures emotional intelligence at the executive level and this is a study about predicting career success at the workplace.
Besides these potential design flaws, the study was conducted at a mid-western university in the United States of America and on 295 business majors. The size of the sample and its source make it difficult to do significant generalisation on academic success, other than for those campuses and individuals who share similar characteristics. The assumption that business executives come from business majors may be a bit difficult to accept, and their inclusion into the study could produce strong reasons for wider generalisation.
I have uncovered other weaknesses in the findings. There is no evidence to suggest that the authors had controlled the study for gender and developmental differences. Mayer, Caruso and Salovey (1999) have found evidence for gender differences in emotional intelligence. They have found females to outperform males by about a 0.5 standard deviation on these emotional intelligence tasks when consensus agreement scoring is used. There were 126 females and only 97 males in the current study and this may push the mean forward given the unique features of females in emotional intelligence. Schutte and Malouff (1998) also report that upper level university students had higher emotional intelligence scores than did their freshmen counterparts. This seems to resonate with Mayer and Salovey’s (1997) framework of psychological processes in emotional intelligence. They claim that people obtain higher levels of emotional and intellect growth once they have taken time to gain mastery of the previous levels. In the current study, the mean age of domestic students was 23 while their international counterparts were averaged at 25. It may be difficult to suggest that these two groups share the same predictors in the emotional intelligence scales given these earlier studies.
Furthermore, the authors have not acknowledged the contradictions found in the findings of international student affiliated with extra-curriculum activities and the positive correlation they have established between emotional intelligence and affiliation with extra-curriculum activities. While the international students scored lower than their domestic counterparts, there are significant differences within each category. International students who engaged in extra-curriculum activities did better than other international students who are not affiliated with any sorts of club. These differences are significantly higher than those found the domestic group. This may suggest that there was emotion work (Opengart, 2005) carried out by the international students to ‘fit’ into their clubs. In addition, more interesting information could be revealed if participants were asked about their membership in informal groups. This requirement was excluded from the study. This portion of the study is also intriguing because it contradicts with Smart’s (2004) conclusion that there is no significant association between university athletic participation and emotional intelligence levels of university students of either gender. Another suspicion I have about this piece of finding is whether there is discrimination in the university that prevented international students from being affiliated with their clubs or becoming fully functional in them. The authors have not included this in their discussion.
Towards the end of the article, the authors conclude from the findings that certain factors in the emotional intelligence scale may predict academic success. Although much were written to inform management development practitioners about the care they need to exercise in recruiting and managing foreign students, nothing is said about the emotional intelligence predictors for them, especially they are being differentiated from the domestic ones.
The study was set up to conduct a study that determines the emotional competencies for achieving academic success and they used the institution-specific GPA and cumulative GPA as measures of academic success. The authors wish to use the findings and conclusions drawn from the research to describe the emotional competencies that management development professionals should look out for when identifying high potentials, and that business executive need to acquire to create workplace performance and career success. I think the reason posit by the authors creates problems in the study.
In establishing this connection, they have down played Goleman’s (1998) contention that such measurements lack the predictive ability for academic and career success. They have acknowledged the limitations of using these ‘surrogates’ but do so in return for expediency in the research. The authors are quiet about the link between successful intelligence and emotional intelligence. According to Sternberg (1996), individuals possessing successful traits are able to translate academic success into success in the workplace. The authors suggest successful intelligence ‘parallels’ emotional intelligence but they have not explain the ways they could overlap each other. This is another black box that needs further exploration by the authors to make their argument of the connection more powerful. Finally, the authors have not provided any information to explain the means workplace success could be potentially predicted by academic success. Without these in the open, the justifications for the alignment are quite dubious.
All in all, I have some strong doubts about the vigour and credibility of the study.
The study suggests that individuals are pre-disposed for workplace success and there are several drivers that shape this disposition.
Sailing has been classified a SPEX sport in the country. Given this national status, there is pressure in the sailing community to identify coaches with the right dispositions to coach sailing (Martens, 1987). The availability of a tool that could predict workplace performance and career commitment (Dries and Pepermans, 2007) is extremely useful. This study provides clues into the derivation of the authors’ five-factor Emotional Quotient Test from Goleman’s original 137-item scale (Goleman, 1998) as well as the problems the authors subsequently encountered.
An effective coach is capable of appreciating the constraints imposed on coaching (Saury and Durand, 1998). The knowledge of the general disposition of his athletes helps him modify his coaching behaviour and operating strategies to create the best physical and social environment for his charges to train in.
The authors have described the drivers for the disposition and I found them to be relevant since coaches are beginning to see sailors of foreign origins coming into their coaching teams. Also, sailor who participates in extra-curriculum activities other than sailing may demonstrate a fuller integration of the values and regulations (Lafreniere, Jowett, Vallerand, Donahue and Lorimer) of sailing into his identify. It is interesting to know if this could be a mediating factor for positive emotions in the coach-athlete relationship. As some sailors are currently undergraduates of the local universities, the authors’ suggestion of academic majors having an influence on the quality of the emotional competencies is intriguing and it is worth further examination in the context of the coach-athlete relationship. These variables need to be accounted for in the scope of my research for without them, they may skew my analysis and render my findings invalid.
In the article, the authors have articulated the purpose of this study on several occasions. They wanted to advice management of the variables that may create differentiators between individuals exhibiting high and low emotional competencies and their links to workplace performance. They have found that the academic field the individual had majored in, his membership of extra-curriculum activities, and his foreign status at his university as these variables.
As this article was published in a management development journal, readers may use these as heuristics to develop their human resource policies without fully appreciate the scope and limitations of the study. They may end up labelling all individuals who possess similar academic background as having low emotional competencies. Some forms of discrimination may develop in the management of these foreign executives and this selection perspective of emotional intelligence (Dries and Pepermans, 2007) may cause the high potential executive identification system to become ineffective and it could deprive deserving executives of their developmental and growth opportunities in their organisations.
Conclusion
These articles continue to show a major gap in the body of knowledge in coaching, not just in Singapore, but also in the rest of the world (Drury, 2007). This awareness merits further exploration of the affective state on coach on his athlete’s sports performance and outcome (Turnbull and Wolfson, 2002). Since I am a member of sailing fraternity, I will like to be the first to this study this arena.
Bibliography
Briscoe, J.P. and Hall, D.T. (1999). Grooming and picking leaders using competency frameworks: Do they work? An alternative approach and new guidelines for practice. Organisational Dynamics, 28(1), 37-52.
Cooper, R. K. and Sawaf, A. (1997). Executive EQ: Emotional intelligence in leadership and organisations. Grosset:Putname:New York.
Depape, A.R., Hakim-Larson, J., Voelker, S., Page, S. and Jackson, S.L. (2006). Self-talk and emotional intelligence in University students. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 38(3), 250-260.
Dries, N. and Pepermans, R. (2007). Using emotional intelligence to identify high potential: A metacompetency perspective. Leadership and Organisation Development Journal, 28(8), 749-770.
Drury, L. (2007). Coaches’ perceptions of emotional and social intelligence. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, (ISBN No. 9780494394922). Canada: University of Toronto.
Dulewicz, V. and Higgs, M.J. (2004). Can emotional intelligence be developed? International Journal of Human Resource Management, 15(1), 95-111.
Goleman, D. (1998). Working with emotional intelligence. Bloomsbury:London, 317.
Hodgins, H. S. and Knee, R. (2002). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The Broaden and Build theory of positive emotions. The American Psychologist, 56, 218-226.
Jowett, S. (2008). What makes coaches tick? The impact of coaches’ intrinsic and extrinsic motive on their own satisfaction and that of their athletes. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, 18(5), 664-673.
Lafreniere, M. K., Jowett, S., Vallerand, R. J., Donahue, E. G. and Lorimer, R. (2008). Passion in Sport: On the quality of the coach-athlete relationship. Journal of Sports and Exercise Psychology, 30, 541-560.
Livingstone, H. A. (2001). Assessing emotional intelligence measures: Do they predict work and life outcomes? Saint Mary’s University:Canada.
Lyle, J. (1999).Coaching principles and coaching behaviour. In Cross, J. L. and Lyle, J.(Eds.), The coaching process: Principles and practice for sports. Butterworth:Heinemann:Oxford, 25-48.
Martens, R. (1987). Science, knowledge and sport psychology. The Sport Psychologist, 1, 29-55.
Mayer, J. D., Caruso, D. and Salovey, P. (1999). Emotional intelligence meets traditional standards for an intelligence. Intelligence, 27, 267-298.
Mayer, J. D. and Salovey, P. (1997). What is emotional intelligence. In Salovey, P. and Sluyter, D. (Eds.), Emotional development, emotional literacy, and emotional intelligence, Basic Books:New York.
Morin, A. (1993). Self-talk and self-awareness: On the nature of the relation. The Journal of Mind and Behaviour, 14, 223-234.
Opengart, R. (2005). Emotional intelligence and emotion work: Examining constructs from an interdisciplinary framework. Human Resource Development Review, 4(1), 49-62.
Perlini, A. H. and Halverson, T. R. (2006). Emotional Intelligence in the National Hockey League, 38(2), 109-119.
Rozell, E. J., Pettijohn, C. E. and Parker, R. S. (2002), An empirical evaluation of emotional intelligence: The impact on management. The Journal of Management Development, 21(4), 272-289.
Saury, J. and Durand, M. (1998). On-site study of coaching in sailing. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 69(3), 254-266.
Schutte, N. S. and Malouff, J. M. (1998, May). Developmental and interpersonal aspects of emotional intelligence. Presneted at the Convention of the American Psychological Society, Washington:DC.
Short, S. E. and Short, M. W. (2005). Essay: Role of the coach in the coach-athlete relationship. Medicine and Sports, 366, 529-530.
Smart, R. C. (2004). Exploring the link between Canadian university athletics and emotionally intelligent leadership potential. Unpublished master thesis, (ISBN No. 0612990214). Canada:Ontario:Ottawa: Carleton University.
Sternberg, R. J. (1996). Successful intelligence: How practical and creative intelligence determine success in life. Simon & Schuster:New York.
Tischler, L., Biberman, J. and McKeage, R. (2002). Linking emotional intelligence, spirituality and workplace performance: Definitions, models and ideas for research. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 17(3), 203-218.
Trzaskoma-Bicserdy, G., Bognar, J., Revesz, L. and Geczi, G. (2007). The coach-athlete relationship in successful Hungarian individual sports. International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching, 9(4), 458-495.
Turnbull, M. and Wolfson, S. (2002). Effects of exercise and outcome feedback on mood: Evidence for misattribution. Journal of Sport Behaviour, 25(4), 394-406.
Vallerand, R. J. (2008). On the psychology of passion: In search of what makes people’s lives most worth living. Canadian Psychology, 85, 756-767.
Winster, A. and Naglieri, J. (2003). Overt and covert verbal problem-solving strategies: Development trends in use, awareness, and relations with task performance in children 5 to 17. Child Development, 74, 659-678.
Goleman (1998) defines emotional intelligence as the capacity for recognising one’s own feelings and those of others for the purpose of managing our emotions and the emotions of others whom we are related with. As a national sailing coach in Singapore, this is of utmost interest to me as much has been written about the importance of coach-athlete relationship and the factors influencing its quality (motivation, Jowett (2008); leadership styles, Trzaskoma-Bicserdy, Bognar, Revesz and Geczi, (2007)), and its ultimate impact on the athlete’s performance (Cross and Lyle, 1999). It is surprising to learn that coaches are not familiar with the concepts of emotional intelligence and they largely operate to maintain unilateral control or power over the athletes (Drury, 2007). If the relationship between the coach and athlete is so important, how does emotional intelligence of the coach supports his athletes in sustaining a positive coach-athlete relationship and in creating opportunities for better performance in his athletes. In another words, what is the impact of the coach’s emotional competencies on the career success of his athletes?
Annotated Citations
During the keyword search for literature that may shed light into my research interest, 36 articles are found and seven of these are discarded as they are later found not relevant. The reminder is grouped into seven broad categories. These categories include Emotional Intelligence and Performance, Emotional Intelligence and Coaching, Coach-Athlete Relationship and Performance, Emotional Intelligence and Definitions, Use of Emotions in Sports, Application of Emotional Intelligence in Coaching, and Impact of Coach’s Emotion on Performance of Athletes. The list of 29 articles is presented in the bibliography.
The following five articles are selected from five of these categories and they represent the more influential studies and record the most recent development in their respective fields. Collectively, they provide five different perspectives, each adding to enlarge my understanding of emotional intelligence, and its impact of the coach on his athletes. An extended critical review of the fifth article can be found towards the end of this article.
Dries, N. and Pepermans, R. (2007). Using emotional intelligence to identify high potential: a metagcompetency perspective. Leadership and Organisation Development Journal, 28(8), 749-770.
The authors have observed that the competency frameworks used by organisations to identify their high potentials is derived from the competencies of past and current cohort of successful executives rather from those competencies of future executives dealing with future challenges. They argue that the inclusion of emotional intelligence components into the frameworks may re-orientate this approach of identifying high potentials and enhancing the job performance and commitment of these future executives in the organisations.
They have proposed the use of Emotional Intelligence Personal Factor Model (Dulewicz and Higgs, 2004) and Meta-competency Model of Continuous Learning (Briscoe and Hall, 1999) as the key concepts underlining their study. They believe that by uncovering the executives’ meta-competencies, which is their ability to self-correct in response to new and unfamiliar demand of the environment and to self-reflect and assimilate what is learnt; executive potential could be better predicted and managed.
The research, which examines the emotional intelligence-high potential link, and the relationships between job performance and career commitment, involved 102 managers from three organisations from the financial, insurance and telecom industries in Belgium.
While assertiveness, independence, optimism and a few other elements appear to be ‘covert’ high-potential identification criteria, it is problematic to generalise these across the population because of the small sample size and the self-enhancement bias fostered by the self-reporting nature of the instrument used, which may skew the findings. These limitations are acknowledged by the authors.
The research was carried out in a few industries and in a Dutch-speaking region. It is also difficult to discount the possibility of industry-specific influences and cross-cultural differences from the findings. Still, the research provides a gleam into the possibility of strengthening the current approach of high potential identification with the knowledge from emotional intelligence.
The key weakness in this study is in the instrument – EQ-i. It was used in the study as a proxy for Briscoe and Hall’s meta-competency model (1999), and the authors have acknowledged that the correspondences between the elements in the instrument and those in the model are tentative and they ‘merely serve to demonstrate the probability of a connection between emotional intelligence and the potential for continuous learning’.
There is a discussion of EQ-i in the article which includes a segment on its criticisms. A similar discussion was presented by Livingstone (2001) where she queried about EQ-i measures and what they predict. Her study suggests that EQ-i greatly co-relates with the Big Five personality dimensions and accounts for both job and life satisfaction after controlling for the influence of demographic characteristics and personality. This may further suggest an inherent validity problem in the findings of Dries and Peperman’s research because they may not have been aware of this limitation and have not conducted the controls.
This study seems to indicate that the emotional intelligence of the coach may not have a significant impact on the performance of his athlete if the athlete has the ability to learn from past experience and to control his stress level effectively. These metacompetencies prevent the athlete from having negative effects on his sailing career-related attitudes. This awareness is important in my research because ignoring it may inject errors into my findings – coaches’ impact on their athletes’ performance may be misread because their athletes are able to negate the effects on their own.
There could be a certain degree of ‘us-verses-them’ sensitivity in the research as without the confidentiality, the job morale and commitment of those classified as non-high potential may severely be affected. The authors had deployed a series of measures to protect the identities of those involved in the study.
Depape, A.R., Hakim-Larson, J., Voelker, S., Page, S. and Jackson, S.L. (2006). Self-talk and emotional intelligence in University students. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 38(3), 250-260.
In this study, the authors bring two bodies of knowledge together – self-talk and emotional intelligence. Self-talk is the reproduction of the perspectives of others in an individual’s private speech. It is a strategy one adopts to solve his social and emotional problems, and in the process develops his self-concept.
In this definition, the authors uncovered a bridge that may link these two concepts. The literature indicates that inner speech positively correlates to private and public self-consciousness, and the authors believe that by attending to these inner thoughts frequently, one is more able to attain higher self-awareness and better at regulating one’s emotions. The authors conclude that certain aspects of self-talk are subsets of emotional intelligence since it includes the ability to recognise, express, regulate and harness emotions, which are terms familiar to self-talk enthusiasts. For these, they want to examine this link and argue that when one engages more in self-talk, he tends to exhibit higher levels of emotional intelligence. They also want to include developmental and gender differences in emotional intelligence into the study.
The study involved 126 participants between the ages of 18 to 42. They were recruited through the Psychological Department of a mid-size, ethnically diverse University in southern Ontario, Canada.
The research empirically suggests that some aspects of self-talk are found to predict emotional intelligence but there are several limitations in the study that make it difficult to extrapolate the findings to the general population.
Besides working with a small sample size, the research is too broadly based. The ages of the participants are too dispersed and ethnically they are too diverse. There could be over-reporting because of the self-reporting nature of some of the instruments used and credit points were awarded to participants. The possibility of under-reporting could not be discounted since previous studies highlighted that participants may not be aware that they were engaged in self-talk (Winster and Naglieri, 2003). In addition, there seems to be a problem with the triangulation carried out in the study. The global Self-Verbalisation Questionnaire score predicted emotional intelligence but not the Self-Talk Scale. This calls into question the reliability of these instruments and the authors’ understanding of what they truly measure (Livingstone, 2001).
One key weakness the authors did not acknowledge is that they have not included the developmental differences in self-talk - practices, familiarity, social setting and task difficulties, which they mentioned in their literature research, in the study. One is not sure how the findings may change when these were factored into the design of the research.
This research reminds me of an article written by Tischler, Biberman and McKeage (2002). They have attempted to link spirituality and emotional intelligence to workplace performance. They suggest that, while the concepts begin from separate areas, they appear to lead to similar attitudes, behaviours and skills. It is currently unknown if empirical studies have been conducted to establish this link but this shows that there is interest in several quarters in the academia to link their field of study to emotional intelligence.
Depape et al.’s article is relevant to my sphere of study because it suggests self-talk is most likely to occur when there is a difference in perspective within one self and between one self and others. Self-awareness is enhanced when it is accompanied by positive affect and constricted when accompanied by negative affect (Morin, 1993). This provides the first strong indication from the literature I have gathered that the emotional intelligence of the coach could affect the performance of his athletes.
There are several questions that kept occurring in my mind as I read this article – Is there harm in making the participants aware that they are engaging in self-talk? Would this awareness makes self-talk ineffective to the participant as a strategy in dealing with complex tasks? These are not addressed by the authors. Also, there could be ethical issues with not informing the participants of the purpose of the research before administering the instruments.
Saury, J. and Durand, M. (1998). On-site study of coaching in sailing. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 69(3), 254-266.
The authors believe that the coaching methods used during training are bounded by a specific set of constraints. These constraints are defined by the task and its range of possible and acceptable work strategies, and by the coach’s behaviours, diversity of operating strategies he possesses, and his knowledge of the sport. Given the task and its constraints, the coach has to use all his means to create the appropriate physical and social conditions to achieve the training objectives and for helping his athletes reach their performance goals.
The authors see this as an important study because it directly relates to the athlete’s performance in the sport, and improving this body of knowledge ensures the design of better reason-based coaching methods and schemes for educating and licensing current and future coaches. They have also observed that there were no studies specifically oriented towards describing the constraints inherent in the coaching activity.
They argue for the study of expert coaches recognised as most effective in their field (Martens, 1987) and further state their suspicion that sailing coaches face a unique set of constraints that is different in other sports.
This was a study to analyse the practical knowledge of five expert sailing coaches of the French team preparing for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics Games.
The study has uncovered a set of complex rules that govern the design of coaching activities. However, there are some challenges in generalising these, even in the sailing community. Besides the small sample size, the participants were not randomly selected. As the participants were all male, based in France and were coaches to Olympians, the findings may be valid for coaches sharing a similar space in this universe.
Perhaps the biggest weakness found in this article is that the study is mainly carried out through observations and recalls. As the training sessions took about 3 to 4 hours, fatigue may prevent proper observations and the lengthy duration may degrade recall accuracy. Also, due to weather, there were too much of variables in the study to constitute a valid observation and conducting the study through only five training sessions makes the internal validation more difficult.
In Perlini and Halverson (2006)’s study of emotional intelligence in the National Hockey League, they have found that years-since-draft is the strongest predictor of performance and draft rank is the weakest. This is interesting as it calls into question whether the degree of agility the coach exhibits in implementing coaching activities may be influenced by the years of experience his athletes had withjthe sport.
This is a study regarding coaching in sailing. It lists a set of constraints unique to sailing because of the ‘open’ nature of the sport. In an environment that is unpredictable and uncertain, tactical and strategy component play a important role in the athlete’s development for the sport, and the coach’s ability to ‘see things from the athlete’s point of view’ and ‘attempt to feel what the athlete feels’ suggest the importance of in-depth knowledge about the sport and high level of awareness and monitoring of the self and his athlete by the coach. This means emotional intelligence is an essential skill of the coach to enable joint control of the coach and his athlete over the training session and its coaching activities.
The coaches may not want to reveal much during the study because of the ‘secrets’ in their trade. Their discovery may affect the competitiveness of the coach when a job opening becomes available. This could be an ethical issue. Also, the athletes may be disturbed by the observations conducted by the researchers and these may impact their preparation for the Games.
Lafreniere, M. K., Jowett, S., Vallerand, R. J., Donahue, E. G. and Lorimer, R. (2008). Passion in Sport: On the quality of the coach-athlete relationship. Journal of Sports and Exercise Psychology, 30, 541-560.
The authors argue that harmonious passion of the coach in coaching may cause situational positive emotions that improve the quality of interpersonal relationship between the coach and the athlete, and increase their subjective well-being in the dyad. They also argue that obsessive passion creates no or opposite effects.
They reason that when the coach and his athlete are passionate about their sport, their love for the sport and devotion to reach higher levels of performance could lead them to develop positive coach-athlete relationship.
The authors recognise the dualistic nature of passion and believe that with harmonious passion, the coach autonomously internalise the coaching activity into his identity and become willing to accept it as important but will not allow this urge to come into conflict with other parts of his life. This desire to engage coaching freely and with openness is favourable in creating a positive experience (Hodgin & Knee, 2002) for his athletes.
They see obsessive passion the opposite of the harmonious one because the values and regulations related to coaching are only partially internalised in the identity (Vallerand, 2008). This creates uncontrollable urge to constantly engage in coaching activity at the expense of other parts of the coach’s life, which runs the risk of experiencing negative consequences during and after the passionate activity.
Two studies were conducted to investigate the role of passion in the quality of coach-athlete relationships. The first study consisted of 157 British college athletes comprising of about equal number of the two genders pegged at difference performance levels. The second study included 106 French-Canadian coaches with different levels of coaching certifications. There are only 6 female coaches in this study and both studies took participants from different popular sports.
While the two studies suggest that there is empirical evidence to support the arguments, the difficulties in generalising this across the population are many folds. Like in the previous three articles, the small sample size and the self-reporting nature of the instruments could introduce biases into the findings. At most, the findings may be applicable in Canada, and maybe only to the French-speaking parts of the country. Since this is a study about the coach and passion in coaching, the study should account for gender differences. This, the authors have acknowledged as a weakness in the studies.
It was not mentioned in the article but if my assumptions are correct, then it is strange to conduct two related studies with English-speaking students and a seemingly different group of French-speaking coaches. The studies could be strengthened if the coaches of these English-speaking athletes were invited to the study and the two studies were carried out with matching sport certifications of the coach and athlete performance levels.
The studies ruminate well with the essay on the role of the coach in the coach-athlete relationship (Short and Short, 2005). The authors talked about the coach needing to be the athlete’s friend and mentor and the positive effects of doing this role well on the feelings and satisfaction of the athlete with his coach.
These two studies are important to my research topic as they suggest mitigation elements that may affect the coach’s level of emotional intelligence on the performance of his athletes. If the coach has a harmonious passion for the sport, naturally he tends to create a positive relationship with his athletes. Based on these two studies, the opposite is true as well. So, the disposition of the coach has a say in the nature of his emotional competencies.
These studies may look like an exercise of conducting a 360-degree feedback on the coach by his athletes, which may be sensitive for the coach if his performance and remuneration is based on the quality of the coach-athlete relationship. It is not mentioned in the article how this was been addressed.
Rozell, E. J., Pettijohn, C. E. and Parker, R. S. (2002). An empirical evaluation of emotional intelligence: The impact on management development. The Journal of Management Development, 21(4), 272-289.
The authors wanted to use Goleman’s 137-item emotional quotient test as the basis for assessing the efficacy of using emotional intelligence as a predictor of academic success of 295 undergraduate business majors from a mid-western university in the United States of America. They believe that the emotional intelligence of these students may be positively correlated to their academic performance.
However, they suspected that there are variances in the results and argue that the differences in the emotional quotient scores between groups of business undergraduates may be attributed to the academic majors they had specialised in, the extra-curriculum activities they were affiliated to, and the student status they currently holding to. The study was set up to identify these driving differentiators as well as to validate the properties of Goleman’s five dimensions of emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1998) and the capacities of his measurement in identifying these properties.
They have provided four reasons for conducting this study. They hope that their effort could inform on the enhancements to current high potentials identification systems, appropriate management development programmes that human resource practitioners should create to train and develop these potentials, cultural differences in using emotional intelligence, and scale for measuring emotional intelligence of prospective managers in an expeditious manner. They argue that their findings could be extrapolated from academic success into workplace performance and career success of potential and current cohort of business executives.
There is no mention of the 137-item emotional quotient test in the references the authors have provided in their bibliography. Besides describing the five dimensions and 25 competencies, Goleman (1998) has not directly presented the instrument although there are clues that he had conducted some studies on his own or assisted in the conduct of some studies with other collaborators who had use his competencies as the framework for analysis. Also, this instrument is not included in Livingstone’s (2001) literature review when she set about to conduct an assessment of emotional intelligence measures. Given the importance of Goleman’s work and the frequency the dimensions are cited by other academics, I find the silence on the instrument strange and I am suspicious about the origins of this test.
Even if the emotional quotient test could be traced to Goleman, the factor analysis the authors had conducted on the 137 items may have caused validity problems in the instrument. The regrouping of these items into six factors, reducing these to five, and forcefully aligning them to Goleman’s five dimensions of emotional intelligence is problematic. With phrases like ‘maybe viewed’, ‘most closely related to’, ‘very similar to’, ‘seems to be’ and ‘perceived as being’ found in the same passage where the authors were describing the factor analysis process suggests that to a large extent, they are not fully convinced that there is a total fit between the emotional quotient test they had created and Goleman’s dimensions.
I have also found one important weakness in the instrument. On examination of Factor 4 – ‘Customer satisfaction focus’, of the authors’ emotional intelligence scale, I find the word - ‘customers’, appearing in five of the six statements in this category. I think this set of statements may not be respondent friendly as almost 80% of the participants are undergraduates and may not have work experience. Even for those who had accumulated hours of outside employment, they may not be in professions they were studying at the university at that moment. They may have difficulties relating to ‘customers’ in Factor 4. This may have skewed the findings and conclusions made about the emotional intelligence of accounting majors. Of course, using only 15 accounting majors to reach this conclusion is already a challenge.
Interestingly, the article mentions about Cooper and Sawaf’s (1997) EQ MAP test in the article. While it is not validated, it could be used for the study since it measures emotional intelligence at the executive level and this is a study about predicting career success at the workplace.
Besides these potential design flaws, the study was conducted at a mid-western university in the United States of America and on 295 business majors. The size of the sample and its source make it difficult to do significant generalisation on academic success, other than for those campuses and individuals who share similar characteristics. The assumption that business executives come from business majors may be a bit difficult to accept, and their inclusion into the study could produce strong reasons for wider generalisation.
I have uncovered other weaknesses in the findings. There is no evidence to suggest that the authors had controlled the study for gender and developmental differences. Mayer, Caruso and Salovey (1999) have found evidence for gender differences in emotional intelligence. They have found females to outperform males by about a 0.5 standard deviation on these emotional intelligence tasks when consensus agreement scoring is used. There were 126 females and only 97 males in the current study and this may push the mean forward given the unique features of females in emotional intelligence. Schutte and Malouff (1998) also report that upper level university students had higher emotional intelligence scores than did their freshmen counterparts. This seems to resonate with Mayer and Salovey’s (1997) framework of psychological processes in emotional intelligence. They claim that people obtain higher levels of emotional and intellect growth once they have taken time to gain mastery of the previous levels. In the current study, the mean age of domestic students was 23 while their international counterparts were averaged at 25. It may be difficult to suggest that these two groups share the same predictors in the emotional intelligence scales given these earlier studies.
Furthermore, the authors have not acknowledged the contradictions found in the findings of international student affiliated with extra-curriculum activities and the positive correlation they have established between emotional intelligence and affiliation with extra-curriculum activities. While the international students scored lower than their domestic counterparts, there are significant differences within each category. International students who engaged in extra-curriculum activities did better than other international students who are not affiliated with any sorts of club. These differences are significantly higher than those found the domestic group. This may suggest that there was emotion work (Opengart, 2005) carried out by the international students to ‘fit’ into their clubs. In addition, more interesting information could be revealed if participants were asked about their membership in informal groups. This requirement was excluded from the study. This portion of the study is also intriguing because it contradicts with Smart’s (2004) conclusion that there is no significant association between university athletic participation and emotional intelligence levels of university students of either gender. Another suspicion I have about this piece of finding is whether there is discrimination in the university that prevented international students from being affiliated with their clubs or becoming fully functional in them. The authors have not included this in their discussion.
Towards the end of the article, the authors conclude from the findings that certain factors in the emotional intelligence scale may predict academic success. Although much were written to inform management development practitioners about the care they need to exercise in recruiting and managing foreign students, nothing is said about the emotional intelligence predictors for them, especially they are being differentiated from the domestic ones.
The study was set up to conduct a study that determines the emotional competencies for achieving academic success and they used the institution-specific GPA and cumulative GPA as measures of academic success. The authors wish to use the findings and conclusions drawn from the research to describe the emotional competencies that management development professionals should look out for when identifying high potentials, and that business executive need to acquire to create workplace performance and career success. I think the reason posit by the authors creates problems in the study.
In establishing this connection, they have down played Goleman’s (1998) contention that such measurements lack the predictive ability for academic and career success. They have acknowledged the limitations of using these ‘surrogates’ but do so in return for expediency in the research. The authors are quiet about the link between successful intelligence and emotional intelligence. According to Sternberg (1996), individuals possessing successful traits are able to translate academic success into success in the workplace. The authors suggest successful intelligence ‘parallels’ emotional intelligence but they have not explain the ways they could overlap each other. This is another black box that needs further exploration by the authors to make their argument of the connection more powerful. Finally, the authors have not provided any information to explain the means workplace success could be potentially predicted by academic success. Without these in the open, the justifications for the alignment are quite dubious.
All in all, I have some strong doubts about the vigour and credibility of the study.
The study suggests that individuals are pre-disposed for workplace success and there are several drivers that shape this disposition.
Sailing has been classified a SPEX sport in the country. Given this national status, there is pressure in the sailing community to identify coaches with the right dispositions to coach sailing (Martens, 1987). The availability of a tool that could predict workplace performance and career commitment (Dries and Pepermans, 2007) is extremely useful. This study provides clues into the derivation of the authors’ five-factor Emotional Quotient Test from Goleman’s original 137-item scale (Goleman, 1998) as well as the problems the authors subsequently encountered.
An effective coach is capable of appreciating the constraints imposed on coaching (Saury and Durand, 1998). The knowledge of the general disposition of his athletes helps him modify his coaching behaviour and operating strategies to create the best physical and social environment for his charges to train in.
The authors have described the drivers for the disposition and I found them to be relevant since coaches are beginning to see sailors of foreign origins coming into their coaching teams. Also, sailor who participates in extra-curriculum activities other than sailing may demonstrate a fuller integration of the values and regulations (Lafreniere, Jowett, Vallerand, Donahue and Lorimer) of sailing into his identify. It is interesting to know if this could be a mediating factor for positive emotions in the coach-athlete relationship. As some sailors are currently undergraduates of the local universities, the authors’ suggestion of academic majors having an influence on the quality of the emotional competencies is intriguing and it is worth further examination in the context of the coach-athlete relationship. These variables need to be accounted for in the scope of my research for without them, they may skew my analysis and render my findings invalid.
In the article, the authors have articulated the purpose of this study on several occasions. They wanted to advice management of the variables that may create differentiators between individuals exhibiting high and low emotional competencies and their links to workplace performance. They have found that the academic field the individual had majored in, his membership of extra-curriculum activities, and his foreign status at his university as these variables.
As this article was published in a management development journal, readers may use these as heuristics to develop their human resource policies without fully appreciate the scope and limitations of the study. They may end up labelling all individuals who possess similar academic background as having low emotional competencies. Some forms of discrimination may develop in the management of these foreign executives and this selection perspective of emotional intelligence (Dries and Pepermans, 2007) may cause the high potential executive identification system to become ineffective and it could deprive deserving executives of their developmental and growth opportunities in their organisations.
Conclusion
These articles continue to show a major gap in the body of knowledge in coaching, not just in Singapore, but also in the rest of the world (Drury, 2007). This awareness merits further exploration of the affective state on coach on his athlete’s sports performance and outcome (Turnbull and Wolfson, 2002). Since I am a member of sailing fraternity, I will like to be the first to this study this arena.
This essay was first written on 26 Jan 2009.
Copyright 2009. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2009. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.
Bibliography
Briscoe, J.P. and Hall, D.T. (1999). Grooming and picking leaders using competency frameworks: Do they work? An alternative approach and new guidelines for practice. Organisational Dynamics, 28(1), 37-52.
Cooper, R. K. and Sawaf, A. (1997). Executive EQ: Emotional intelligence in leadership and organisations. Grosset:Putname:New York.
Depape, A.R., Hakim-Larson, J., Voelker, S., Page, S. and Jackson, S.L. (2006). Self-talk and emotional intelligence in University students. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 38(3), 250-260.
Dries, N. and Pepermans, R. (2007). Using emotional intelligence to identify high potential: A metacompetency perspective. Leadership and Organisation Development Journal, 28(8), 749-770.
Drury, L. (2007). Coaches’ perceptions of emotional and social intelligence. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, (ISBN No. 9780494394922). Canada: University of Toronto.
Dulewicz, V. and Higgs, M.J. (2004). Can emotional intelligence be developed? International Journal of Human Resource Management, 15(1), 95-111.
Goleman, D. (1998). Working with emotional intelligence. Bloomsbury:London, 317.
Hodgins, H. S. and Knee, R. (2002). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The Broaden and Build theory of positive emotions. The American Psychologist, 56, 218-226.
Jowett, S. (2008). What makes coaches tick? The impact of coaches’ intrinsic and extrinsic motive on their own satisfaction and that of their athletes. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, 18(5), 664-673.
Lafreniere, M. K., Jowett, S., Vallerand, R. J., Donahue, E. G. and Lorimer, R. (2008). Passion in Sport: On the quality of the coach-athlete relationship. Journal of Sports and Exercise Psychology, 30, 541-560.
Livingstone, H. A. (2001). Assessing emotional intelligence measures: Do they predict work and life outcomes? Saint Mary’s University:Canada.
Lyle, J. (1999).Coaching principles and coaching behaviour. In Cross, J. L. and Lyle, J.(Eds.), The coaching process: Principles and practice for sports. Butterworth:Heinemann:Oxford, 25-48.
Martens, R. (1987). Science, knowledge and sport psychology. The Sport Psychologist, 1, 29-55.
Mayer, J. D., Caruso, D. and Salovey, P. (1999). Emotional intelligence meets traditional standards for an intelligence. Intelligence, 27, 267-298.
Mayer, J. D. and Salovey, P. (1997). What is emotional intelligence. In Salovey, P. and Sluyter, D. (Eds.), Emotional development, emotional literacy, and emotional intelligence, Basic Books:New York.
Morin, A. (1993). Self-talk and self-awareness: On the nature of the relation. The Journal of Mind and Behaviour, 14, 223-234.
Opengart, R. (2005). Emotional intelligence and emotion work: Examining constructs from an interdisciplinary framework. Human Resource Development Review, 4(1), 49-62.
Perlini, A. H. and Halverson, T. R. (2006). Emotional Intelligence in the National Hockey League, 38(2), 109-119.
Rozell, E. J., Pettijohn, C. E. and Parker, R. S. (2002), An empirical evaluation of emotional intelligence: The impact on management. The Journal of Management Development, 21(4), 272-289.
Saury, J. and Durand, M. (1998). On-site study of coaching in sailing. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 69(3), 254-266.
Schutte, N. S. and Malouff, J. M. (1998, May). Developmental and interpersonal aspects of emotional intelligence. Presneted at the Convention of the American Psychological Society, Washington:DC.
Short, S. E. and Short, M. W. (2005). Essay: Role of the coach in the coach-athlete relationship. Medicine and Sports, 366, 529-530.
Smart, R. C. (2004). Exploring the link between Canadian university athletics and emotionally intelligent leadership potential. Unpublished master thesis, (ISBN No. 0612990214). Canada:Ontario:Ottawa: Carleton University.
Sternberg, R. J. (1996). Successful intelligence: How practical and creative intelligence determine success in life. Simon & Schuster:New York.
Tischler, L., Biberman, J. and McKeage, R. (2002). Linking emotional intelligence, spirituality and workplace performance: Definitions, models and ideas for research. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 17(3), 203-218.
Trzaskoma-Bicserdy, G., Bognar, J., Revesz, L. and Geczi, G. (2007). The coach-athlete relationship in successful Hungarian individual sports. International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching, 9(4), 458-495.
Turnbull, M. and Wolfson, S. (2002). Effects of exercise and outcome feedback on mood: Evidence for misattribution. Journal of Sport Behaviour, 25(4), 394-406.
Vallerand, R. J. (2008). On the psychology of passion: In search of what makes people’s lives most worth living. Canadian Psychology, 85, 756-767.
Winster, A. and Naglieri, J. (2003). Overt and covert verbal problem-solving strategies: Development trends in use, awareness, and relations with task performance in children 5 to 17. Child Development, 74, 659-678.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Effects of Coaches' Emotional Competencies On Athletes' Sporting Performance
Rising Affluence of South East Asia Nations
Countries in South East Asia have become more competitive as their economies are subject to less trade restrictions, and more of their people are connected globally. The number of newly rich [i] has grown in these emerging economies and this expansion is found mainly in the middle class. With raising aspirations and broadening wants, their needs are found to be better served by a more open and competitive market that is linked to the rest of the world. These activities have attracted foreign direct investments and it becomes a zero-sum game when multinationals pull out of Singapore to relocate their operations to lower cost nations with growing affluence. To sustain Singapore's economic prosperity and social progression beyond her 43 years of independence, her Government has to look for and experiment with new engines of growth [ii]. To compete, Singapore will have to find new ways.
Sports as New Engine of Growth
To face up to these challenges, the tiny nation is looking for other niche areas as new mechanisms of growth. Sport is one such area. Singapore is using sports as an agent to integrate the influx of new immigrants with the contracting indigenous population. It is also deployed to tap into the global market for talents that could help realise and enhance her potential as the centre of athlete development and sports entertainment. Singapore wants to become a sporting nation and sporting hub in the region.
The recent Formula One Singapore Night Race and
Barclays Singapore Open are testaments to the Government’s commitment and efforts to the latter. The nation is determined to provide world class sporting experience to both the athletes and spectators. The country-wide upgrading of stadiums and sports facilities ahead of the inaugural 2010 Youth Olympics Games and the drive to complete the new 55,000-seat Olympic-size National Stadium (picture to the left) in Kallang in the same year are epitomes of its political will to succeed in this new endeavour.
In sports, the nation has moved away from sending participants to regional and international sport events to expecting performance and medals from these athletes. There is also raising aspiration and expectation of local sports associations to produce home grown athletes for the 2010 Youth Olympics Games and the 2012 London Olympics Games.
To meet and support these demands, the Singapore Sport Council has recently reorganised their priorities and functions. It has introduced policies that encourage sports associations to systemised and professionalise the way they manage their talent pools, and to industrialise their operations so that they could grow in a coherent and sustainable manner. To empower and enlarge this asset, the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports, the Singapore National Olympic Council and the Singapore Sports Council started Project 0812 [iii] in 2006 as the nation’s quest to win the next Olympic Games medal.
The Council also established the National Registry of Coaches [iv] in 2007 with the aim to produce competent coaching personnel and leadership that delivers quality sports development and coaching at the national sports associations, sport clubs and schools. The Council has also instituted a training and development roadmap, and started incentive schemes in the following year to encourage existing coaches to upgrade their skills and to systematically groom the next generation of coaches for the country.
Gaps in the Body of Knowledge in Coaching
My interest in coaching begins after I have retired from competitive sailing and completed several certifications in coaching in October 2007. I believe that I have much to contribute to the sailing community and it is always a delight to see young budding sailors doing well in the sport. However, I am looking for an area where my experience as a sailor and my knowledge in scientific inquiry could be of use. I want to contribute in a different way to help more young sailors meet their aspirations and to fulfil my needs for self-actualisation.
After several weeks of observing the workings of the local sailing community, I found a
breakthrough. Most literature in Singapore examines the biological, physiological and psychological requirements needed to produce an exceptional athlete. Only a handful of studies emphasise the importance of the coach, particularly the effects of the coach’s emotions on the performance of his athletes.
The results from a search in the Singapore Sports Library seem to yield a similar pattern.
It is a good starting point for the Singapore Sport Council to recognise [v] the roles a coach play in the development and performance of their charges. However, this recognition must be substantive. It is meaningless to the sports community to applaud coaches for producing star athletes but who are doing the wrong things. Rewarding coaches for the number of years they had committed to coaching and the amount of medals their star performers had brought for the nation only perpetuate this contradiction. These cannot be the only criteria as they do not further and deepen our knowledge in coaching. Coaches should be elevated to role models only for their dexterity in maintaining positive coach-athlete relationship and applying appropriate coaching behaviour that benefit all types of athletes. It is important that we have a language capable of describing, communicating and building the emotional competencies of a skill coach to achieve this but the common jargon for transmitting this coaching knowledge is missing.
I have also noticed that much of the knowledge and practises of maintaining positive coach-athlete relationship and applying appropriate coaching behaviour in Singapore are generated through experience and this body of knowledge is traditionally handed down from coach to coach. What constitutes as best practice is based to what works, which may be helpful to some coaches but may not be universally useful to all. Many of these rules of thumb are not validated or supported by research and new coaches have to endure long gestation periods before they could coach effectively.
This means that there is an obvious knowledge gap about the impact of coach’s affective state on the athlete's sports performance and outcome, which merits further exploration in Singapore given our aspiration of becoming a sporting nation and hub in the region.
Role of the Coach on Athletes' Performance
In his book, Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goldman reports that conventional measures of intelligence, or IQ, only account for 20% [vi], of a person’s success in life. He further suggests that some of the missing ingredients for success lie in emotional intelligence, which is the capacity to acquire and apply emotional information to a person’s surrounding. In Working with Emotional Intelligence, he presents the five dimensions of emotional intelligence and the twenty-five emotional competencies [vii] for outstanding performance. These five dimensions are presented in the box to the left of this page.
In Leadership That Gets Results, Goleman informs
that though his research he has found direct casual relationship between leadership styles and organisational performance. He says that ‘leaders with strengths in critical mass of six or more emotional intelligence competencies were far more effective than peers who lacked such strengths’ [viii]. He went on to describe the six styles and how these impact the drivers of organisational climate, which in turn affects the overall performance of the organisation. Goleman's own research compared star performers with average ones in senior leadership positions and found that nearly 90% of the difference in their performance profiles was attributable to emotional intelligence factors.
While Goleman’s work in Emotional Intelligence is in the field of education, work and organisational life, I strongly feel that Emotional Intelligence is application in sports, particularly in the success of the coach in helping his athletes reach their full potential.
Key Research Question and Its Subsidiary Inquiries
As such, I am interested to know the types of emotional competencies and dimensions of emotional intelligence that coaches, who produce high performance sailors, display. With this knowledge, it is my hope that the Singapore Sports Council could introduce learning modules on Emotional Intelligence in the training and development roadmaps of coaches to enable to them to coach more professionally.
Due to the long list of potential titles generated, the subsequent searches became more sophisticated, which I had combined several keywords:
[i] Banerjee A. V. and Duflo E. (2007) “What Is Middle Class About The Middle Classes Around The World”, Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[ii] Tan, K. Y., Wu, F., Toh, M. H., Seah, K. W., & Thia, J. P. (2002) “Singapore’s Engines of Growth: A Demand-Side Perspective”, MTI(February): 1-16.
[iii] Teo, C. H. (2007) Speech By Mr Teo Chee Hean, Minister For Defence, President Singapore National Olympic Council at The Singapore Sports Awards 2007 on Thursday 21 June 2007 At 8 PM at The Padang/Collyer Ballroom, Swissotel The Stamford.
[iv] National Registry of Coaches. Singapore Sports Council. http://coaches.ssc.gov.sg/publish/Coaches/home/national_registry.html.
[v] Coach Recognition Awards (CRA). Singapore Sports Council. http://www.ssc.gov.sg/publish/Coaches/home/thanks_coach0/coach_recognition.html.
[vi] Goleman, D. (1995) “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ”, Bantam, pp. 34.
[vii] Goleman, D. (1998) “Working with Emotional Intelligence”, Bantam, pp. 26-27.
[viii] Goleman, D. (2000) “Leadership That Gets Results”, Harvard Business Review, 78(2):78-90.
Countries in South East Asia have become more competitive as their economies are subject to less trade restrictions, and more of their people are connected globally. The number of newly rich [i] has grown in these emerging economies and this expansion is found mainly in the middle class. With raising aspirations and broadening wants, their needs are found to be better served by a more open and competitive market that is linked to the rest of the world. These activities have attracted foreign direct investments and it becomes a zero-sum game when multinationals pull out of Singapore to relocate their operations to lower cost nations with growing affluence. To sustain Singapore's economic prosperity and social progression beyond her 43 years of independence, her Government has to look for and experiment with new engines of growth [ii]. To compete, Singapore will have to find new ways.
Sports as New Engine of Growth
To face up to these challenges, the tiny nation is looking for other niche areas as new mechanisms of growth. Sport is one such area. Singapore is using sports as an agent to integrate the influx of new immigrants with the contracting indigenous population. It is also deployed to tap into the global market for talents that could help realise and enhance her potential as the centre of athlete development and sports entertainment. Singapore wants to become a sporting nation and sporting hub in the region.
The recent Formula One Singapore Night Race and
Barclays Singapore Open are testaments to the Government’s commitment and efforts to the latter. The nation is determined to provide world class sporting experience to both the athletes and spectators. The country-wide upgrading of stadiums and sports facilities ahead of the inaugural 2010 Youth Olympics Games and the drive to complete the new 55,000-seat Olympic-size National Stadium (picture to the left) in Kallang in the same year are epitomes of its political will to succeed in this new endeavour.In sports, the nation has moved away from sending participants to regional and international sport events to expecting performance and medals from these athletes. There is also raising aspiration and expectation of local sports associations to produce home grown athletes for the 2010 Youth Olympics Games and the 2012 London Olympics Games.
To meet and support these demands, the Singapore Sport Council has recently reorganised their priorities and functions. It has introduced policies that encourage sports associations to systemised and professionalise the way they manage their talent pools, and to industrialise their operations so that they could grow in a coherent and sustainable manner. To empower and enlarge this asset, the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports, the Singapore National Olympic Council and the Singapore Sports Council started Project 0812 [iii] in 2006 as the nation’s quest to win the next Olympic Games medal.
The Council also established the National Registry of Coaches [iv] in 2007 with the aim to produce competent coaching personnel and leadership that delivers quality sports development and coaching at the national sports associations, sport clubs and schools. The Council has also instituted a training and development roadmap, and started incentive schemes in the following year to encourage existing coaches to upgrade their skills and to systematically groom the next generation of coaches for the country.
Gaps in the Body of Knowledge in Coaching
My interest in coaching begins after I have retired from competitive sailing and completed several certifications in coaching in October 2007. I believe that I have much to contribute to the sailing community and it is always a delight to see young budding sailors doing well in the sport. However, I am looking for an area where my experience as a sailor and my knowledge in scientific inquiry could be of use. I want to contribute in a different way to help more young sailors meet their aspirations and to fulfil my needs for self-actualisation.
After several weeks of observing the workings of the local sailing community, I found a
breakthrough. Most literature in Singapore examines the biological, physiological and psychological requirements needed to produce an exceptional athlete. Only a handful of studies emphasise the importance of the coach, particularly the effects of the coach’s emotions on the performance of his athletes.The results from a search in the Singapore Sports Library seem to yield a similar pattern.
It is a good starting point for the Singapore Sport Council to recognise [v] the roles a coach play in the development and performance of their charges. However, this recognition must be substantive. It is meaningless to the sports community to applaud coaches for producing star athletes but who are doing the wrong things. Rewarding coaches for the number of years they had committed to coaching and the amount of medals their star performers had brought for the nation only perpetuate this contradiction. These cannot be the only criteria as they do not further and deepen our knowledge in coaching. Coaches should be elevated to role models only for their dexterity in maintaining positive coach-athlete relationship and applying appropriate coaching behaviour that benefit all types of athletes. It is important that we have a language capable of describing, communicating and building the emotional competencies of a skill coach to achieve this but the common jargon for transmitting this coaching knowledge is missing.
I have also noticed that much of the knowledge and practises of maintaining positive coach-athlete relationship and applying appropriate coaching behaviour in Singapore are generated through experience and this body of knowledge is traditionally handed down from coach to coach. What constitutes as best practice is based to what works, which may be helpful to some coaches but may not be universally useful to all. Many of these rules of thumb are not validated or supported by research and new coaches have to endure long gestation periods before they could coach effectively.
This means that there is an obvious knowledge gap about the impact of coach’s affective state on the athlete's sports performance and outcome, which merits further exploration in Singapore given our aspiration of becoming a sporting nation and hub in the region.
Role of the Coach on Athletes' Performance
In his book, Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goldman reports that conventional measures of intelligence, or IQ, only account for 20% [vi], of a person’s success in life. He further suggests that some of the missing ingredients for success lie in emotional intelligence, which is the capacity to acquire and apply emotional information to a person’s surrounding. In Working with Emotional Intelligence, he presents the five dimensions of emotional intelligence and the twenty-five emotional competencies [vii] for outstanding performance. These five dimensions are presented in the box to the left of this page.In Leadership That Gets Results, Goleman informs
that though his research he has found direct casual relationship between leadership styles and organisational performance. He says that ‘leaders with strengths in critical mass of six or more emotional intelligence competencies were far more effective than peers who lacked such strengths’ [viii]. He went on to describe the six styles and how these impact the drivers of organisational climate, which in turn affects the overall performance of the organisation. Goleman's own research compared star performers with average ones in senior leadership positions and found that nearly 90% of the difference in their performance profiles was attributable to emotional intelligence factors.While Goleman’s work in Emotional Intelligence is in the field of education, work and organisational life, I strongly feel that Emotional Intelligence is application in sports, particularly in the success of the coach in helping his athletes reach their full potential.
Key Research Question and Its Subsidiary Inquiries
As such, I am interested to know the types of emotional competencies and dimensions of emotional intelligence that coaches, who produce high performance sailors, display. With this knowledge, it is my hope that the Singapore Sports Council could introduce learning modules on Emotional Intelligence in the training and development roadmaps of coaches to enable to them to coach more professionally.
Guiding me is a set of subsidiary questions, which I will use to investigate the literature. These are:
- Are there newer definitions and further clarifications on Emotional Intelligence since the mid 90’s?
- What the literature has to say about coach-athlete relationship and coach leadership models?
- What has been written about this relationship and the athlete’s performance?
- What has been revealed about the use of emotions in sports?
- Has anyone reported on the application of Emotional Intelligence in sports? Is the application for coaches? What are the outcomes?
- Has anything been said about the impact of a coach’s emotion on the performance of the athlete?
Investigating the Issue
About a week was spent searching the databases and electronic journals for articles that may be useful in 
constructing the knowledge. As I am only looking at coach-athlete relationship and the impact of the coach's emotion on athlete's performance, I was restricting the search to databases and electronic journals covering sports, psychology, coaching, and sport performance. To the right of this page is a print screen of the databases that I had consulted.
- performance and EQ - 0 Hit
- EQ - 0 Hit
- emotion - 5 Hits
- emotional intelligence - 158 Hits
- coaching - 26 Hits
Due to the long list of potential titles generated, the subsequent searches became more sophisticated, which I had combined several keywords:- coaching and sports - 26 Hits
- psychology and coaching - 5 Hits
- emotional intelligence and coaching - 6 Hits
- coach and relationship - 1 Hit
- Relationship - 21 Hits
- emotional intelligence and sports performance - 0 Hit
- emotional intelligence and coaching and sports - 0 Hit
As this is an initial effort, my focus was to hunt for the appropriate articles which could answer or point me to more information that could answer the key and subsidiary questions. Much time was spent reading the abstracts, and where possible the conclusions, to identify the key words that may suggest that the article is a good one to print out for extended reading. I will use Endnotes to record key points from the reading.
Challenges Encountered in the Search
Of course the investigation was done with some difficulties. These includes requests from webmasters to sign-up and pay fees to access the on-line articles. I have encountered several occasions where the browser is unable to recognise the security certificate of the portal housing the electronic journals and I am too coward to enter into them fearing virus attacks and illegal intrusions.
However, it is more challenge locating the right articles. It seems that the literature in this area of study is small. While there is plenty of material in the Internet on sports coaching but they are mostly promotional or self-help materials, which credibility I deeply suspected.
The Literature Reveals......
Nevertheless, by the second week my search had produced some results. While there were 158 hits for the keyword 'emotional intelligence', only 6 came up when 'coaching' was combined with the original keyword. These are some of the potential articles found:
- Andrew M. Lane (ed) (2007). Mood and human performance: c
onceptual, measurement, and applied issues - Clements, M. (2005). Emotional intelligence: could it be the answer to the age-old problem of emotions impacting on athletic performance? Sports coach (Canberra, Aust.); Vol. 28, Issue: 3; 2005: 24-25
- Facilitating emotional intelligence in elite sport. Preview New Zealand Journal of Sports Medicine Summer 2002: Vol. 30 Issue 4. p. 102-105
- Mark Beauchamp and Mark A. Eys. (Eds) (2008). Group dynamics in exercise and sport psychology: contemporary themes
- Meyer, B.B., & Zizzi, S. (2007). Emotional intelligence in sport: Conceptual, methodological, and applied issues. In A.M. Lane (Ed.), Mood and human performance: Conceptual, measurement, and applied issues. London : Nova Science Publishers.
- Meyer, B.B., Fletcher, T.B., Cashin, S.M., Davis, N.W., Cole, M.E., Parker, S.J., Kilty, K.A. (under review). Emotional intelligence in sport: A comparative study of athletes and coaches. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology.
- Meyer, B.B., & Fletcher, T.B. (2007). Emotional intelligence: A theoretical overview and implications for research and professional practice. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology
- Paul Morgan (2001). Emotional intelligence and performance: why do the most gifted athletes often fail to be the best performers? Preview Morgan, P., Coach Spring 2001: Issue 5. p. 27-30
Although only a few articles are found, collectively they suggest that the:
- Quality of the coach-athlete relationship has a long term impact on the athlete’s sports performance.
- Athlete's ability to manage his emotions at the time of the competition seems to have an impact his sports performance in that event.
- Coaches may be able to manipulate the emotions of their athletes to improve their performance at competitions.
Here are the summaries of two articles, which I find relevant to my research interest.
Trzaskoma-Bicsérdy G., Bognár J., Révész L., & Géczi G. (2001) The Coach-Athlete Relationship in Successful Hungarian Individual Sports. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 2(4), pp. 485.
The study indicates that the characteristics and needs of the individual athlete define the coach-athlete relationship
more than the characteristics of the given sport discipline. It reconfirms the importance of the coach-athlete relationship and coaching behaviour on the performance of the athlete in elite sports. It shows that emotional interdependence has an impact on the emotional tone of the relationship that the coach and athlete experience, and it indicates that this is one reason why some coaches are more effective and efficient than others.
This study is relevant to my research interest because its findings strongly suggest that ‘without first establishing respect, esteem and love, the coach and athlete working relationship is at a dead-end. These three key components, which are the defining elements of closeness, have strong emotional connotations, and I will have a keen interest in establishing the emotional competencies driving this construct in the coach-athlete relationship.
Vargas-Tonsing T. M. & Guan J. M. (2007) Athletes’ Preferences for Informational and Emotional Pre-Game Speech Content. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 2(2), pp. 171-180.
The coach has a unique and final opportunity to influence his athletes immediately prior to a competition through the effective use of a pre-game speech. Previous studies highlighted that this coaching technique of providing informational and emotional content in the speech is believed to be beneficial to performance as it is capable of increasing athletes’ feelings of efficacy.
In this study, it is found that athletes preferred differing amounts of information and emotion according to the situation. Athletes’ and coaches’ perceptions of the emotion arising from pre-game speeches differed as well. Gender differences are also detected; female athletes placed higher values on the amount of information than do their male counterparts. No gender differences were found on the amount of emotional content.
This literature is relevant to me because it suggests that coaches may need to possess high emotional competencies to enact the emotions according to the demands of the situation. It is interesting to know the emotional competencies for enabling this enactment.
Conclusion
I will continue to pursuit this line of inquiry as the previous two weeks’ of searches and reading revealed some very interesting insights into the use of emotions in sports. What I really need is a breakthrough. That is to locate specific articles that directly mention the affective state of the coach on the athlete’s performance.
[i] Banerjee A. V. and Duflo E. (2007) “What Is Middle Class About The Middle Classes Around The World”, Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[ii] Tan, K. Y., Wu, F., Toh, M. H., Seah, K. W., & Thia, J. P. (2002) “Singapore’s Engines of Growth: A Demand-Side Perspective”, MTI(February): 1-16.
[iii] Teo, C. H. (2007) Speech By Mr Teo Chee Hean, Minister For Defence, President Singapore National Olympic Council at The Singapore Sports Awards 2007 on Thursday 21 June 2007 At 8 PM at The Padang/Collyer Ballroom, Swissotel The Stamford.
[iv] National Registry of Coaches. Singapore Sports Council. http://coaches.ssc.gov.sg/publish/Coaches/home/national_registry.html.
[v] Coach Recognition Awards (CRA). Singapore Sports Council. http://www.ssc.gov.sg/publish/Coaches/home/thanks_coach0/coach_recognition.html.
[vi] Goleman, D. (1995) “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ”, Bantam, pp. 34.
[vii] Goleman, D. (1998) “Working with Emotional Intelligence”, Bantam, pp. 26-27.
[viii] Goleman, D. (2000) “Leadership That Gets Results”, Harvard Business Review, 78(2):78-90.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Coaching Behaviour and Coach-Athlete Relationship on the Athlete's Sporting Performance and Outcome
Research Poster Presentation
After 43 years of economic growth, Singapore is now turning to sports as her new agent for nation building and growth. She wants to become a sporting nation and the sporting hub in the region.
Attesting to the Government's commitment in this area is the recent Formula One Night Race held in Singapore in September 2008, launch of the inaugural 2010 Youth Olympics in Singapore, completion of the new 90,000-seat national stadium by 2011, and preparations for the 2012 London Olympics.
In sports, the nation has moved away from sending participants to regional and international sporting events to expecting performance and medals from these athletes.
To meet and support these new expectations and aspirations, the Singapore Sport Council has established the Coaches Register in 2007 to regulate the quality of coaching at the National Sports Associations, sport clubs and schools. The Council has also instituted a training and development roadmap and introduced incentive schemes in the following year to encourage existing coaches to professionalise their skills and to systematically
groom the next generation of coaches for the country.
Attesting to the Government's commitment in this area is the recent Formula One Night Race held in Singapore in September 2008, launch of the inaugural 2010 Youth Olympics in Singapore, completion of the new 90,000-seat national stadium by 2011, and preparations for the 2012 London Olympics.
In sports, the nation has moved away from sending participants to regional and international sporting events to expecting performance and medals from these athletes.To meet and support these new expectations and aspirations, the Singapore Sport Council has established the Coaches Register in 2007 to regulate the quality of coaching at the National Sports Associations, sport clubs and schools. The Council has also instituted a training and development roadmap and introduced incentive schemes in the following year to encourage existing coaches to professionalise their skills and to systematically
groom the next generation of coaches for the country.However, there is an obvious knowledge gap about the impact of coaching behaviour and coach-athlete relationship on the athlete's sporting performance and outcome. Most literature in Singapore examines the biological, physiological and psychological requirements needed to produce an exceptional athlete. Only a few studies emphasize the importance of the coach but the coach-athlete relationship merits further exploration in Singapore, particularly, the effects of coaches’ emotions on the performance of their athletes.
Here are the Research Poster Presentations showing the intial research strategies taken and desk research carried out in the past week on this research interest.
This article was 1st written on 31 Oct 2008.
Copyright 2008. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Research Poster Presentation
These posters were 1st created in July 2007 and blogged on 23 Oct 2008.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Summarising and Evaluating an Argument
Learning from Attempts to Improve School:
The Contribution of Methodological Diversity
By Stephen W. Raudenbush
This article provides an interesting read. It presents itself as a thought piece for education policy makers on the perils in the process of finding what works in improving learning outcomes amongst students.
It proposes two seemingly unconnected claims of policy of what ought to be done in education research. The association becomes obvious when the author cleverly rehashes the statement - ‘questions should drive methods’ several times in the article.
Raudenbush claims that instructional regimes and interventions, not resources, accountability and governance, should be conceived as the causal agents for instructional improvements, and they should be the central themes in education research.
He justifies these by highlighting the marginal impact of resources, accountability and governance on learning outcomes, and warrants that ‘effective instruction is not likely to flow from the exertion of policy levers’. He provides several reasons to permit this linkage. He observes that resources, governance and market forces do not remove the knowledge gaps of educators in conducting professional development for teachers, and in selecting, organising, co-ordinating and enacting effective interventions for improving school-wide learning.
This means that the return of investment on the policy levers may show up when the research questions are about the implementation of instructional regimes and interventions, and keeping others as complementary elements that enhance the intensity of the outcomes.
This points us to the primary argument by Raudenbush. He says that systematic experiment is a better way to evaluate claims about casual effects of the interventions deployed in improving teaching and learning in the classrooms. He suggests complementing randomised experiment with mixed or multiple research methods because randomised experiment, while is the best way to discern causal effects, is not enough to verify these effects alone. He indicates that given the cost and the finite amount of funds available for randomised research, there is a need to identify the instructional regimes and interventions that ‘hold the greatest promise in achieving those outcomes’.
This means that education researchers need to known how an instructional intervention could be implemented prior to a ‘randomize trial of effectiveness’. More importantly, they need to be informed if the selected intervention is the most promising one. Therefore, the author warrants that they need to use a variety of research methods, including small randomised research, to conduct descriptive and correlation studies that could suggest that the intervention will work well with the target students in the given learning settings.
In conclusion, I agree that education researchers need to be aware of two blind spots when conducting randomised experiments, and these are deeply ingrained in the statement - ‘questions should drive methods’. Researchers should establish the true causal agents and identify the right target group and settings for the investigation. All else will inform incorrectly, and Raudenbush has used a number of examples in the article to illustrate the use of methodological diversity to avoid this phenomenal.
The Contribution of Methodological Diversity
By Stephen W. Raudenbush
This article provides an interesting read. It presents itself as a thought piece for education policy makers on the perils in the process of finding what works in improving learning outcomes amongst students.
It proposes two seemingly unconnected claims of policy of what ought to be done in education research. The association becomes obvious when the author cleverly rehashes the statement - ‘questions should drive methods’ several times in the article.
Raudenbush claims that instructional regimes and interventions, not resources, accountability and governance, should be conceived as the causal agents for instructional improvements, and they should be the central themes in education research.
He justifies these by highlighting the marginal impact of resources, accountability and governance on learning outcomes, and warrants that ‘effective instruction is not likely to flow from the exertion of policy levers’. He provides several reasons to permit this linkage. He observes that resources, governance and market forces do not remove the knowledge gaps of educators in conducting professional development for teachers, and in selecting, organising, co-ordinating and enacting effective interventions for improving school-wide learning.
This means that the return of investment on the policy levers may show up when the research questions are about the implementation of instructional regimes and interventions, and keeping others as complementary elements that enhance the intensity of the outcomes.
This points us to the primary argument by Raudenbush. He says that systematic experiment is a better way to evaluate claims about casual effects of the interventions deployed in improving teaching and learning in the classrooms. He suggests complementing randomised experiment with mixed or multiple research methods because randomised experiment, while is the best way to discern causal effects, is not enough to verify these effects alone. He indicates that given the cost and the finite amount of funds available for randomised research, there is a need to identify the instructional regimes and interventions that ‘hold the greatest promise in achieving those outcomes’.
This means that education researchers need to known how an instructional intervention could be implemented prior to a ‘randomize trial of effectiveness’. More importantly, they need to be informed if the selected intervention is the most promising one. Therefore, the author warrants that they need to use a variety of research methods, including small randomised research, to conduct descriptive and correlation studies that could suggest that the intervention will work well with the target students in the given learning settings.
In conclusion, I agree that education researchers need to be aware of two blind spots when conducting randomised experiments, and these are deeply ingrained in the statement - ‘questions should drive methods’. Researchers should establish the true causal agents and identify the right target group and settings for the investigation. All else will inform incorrectly, and Raudenbush has used a number of examples in the article to illustrate the use of methodological diversity to avoid this phenomenal.
This report was 1st created on 24 June 2008.
Copyright 2008. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Grading of Essays by University
Currently, my grades, as of 21 Aug 2008, for the essays are as follows:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)