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.
