Identity leadership and social identification within sport teams over a season: A social network analysis

Objectives: This study explored the relationships between identity leadership and social identification in sport teams over the course of a season using social network analysis. Methods: Participants from 23 competitive sport teams (N = 388, Mage = 20.7 years) indicated the extent to which each of their teammates displayed various forms of identity leadership (i.e., identity prototypicality, identity advancement, identity entrepreneurship, identity impresarioship) and the extent to which these same teammates were seen to identify with the team (assessed by ingroup ties, cognitive centrality, ingroup affect) early and later in a season. Quadratic assignment procedure correlations and multiple quadratic assignment procedure regressions examined the relationships between the different types of networks for each team across time. Results: Athletes who perceived team members to show greater identity leadership perceived those same teammates to identify more strongly with the team both early (rsaverage > .46) and later (rsaverage > 0.48) in the season. Averaged across teams, identity entrepreneurship early in the season was most strongly associated with both perceived ingroup ties (beta average = .24) and ingroup affect (beta average = 0.13) later in the season, while identity impresarioship was most strongly associated with cognitive centrality (beta average = .16). In the reversed direction, perceptions of ingroup ties early in the season were most strongly associated with all identity leadership dimensions later in the season (.28 < beta average < 0.38). Conclusions: Collectively, these findings provide evidence of a mutually reinforcing bidirectional link such that teammates who are seen as actively contributing to promote a sense of 'us' among team members are also more likely to be seen as identifying strongly with the team.