From the case study information, it is clear that the main psychology issue the football academy are struggling with is social identity. For example, the athletes are performing as individual’s trying to out win one another, from the behavioural observations it states that ‘the football players have been behaving as a bunch of individuals with little sense of belonging to an academy team’ and ‘it appears there is no emotional attachment between football players within the academy team as a whole’. Tajfel (1978) proposed that social identity is ‘part of an individual 's self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together …show more content…
They aren’t achieving affective outcomes because they aren’t bonding together and the coach states within the case study that “those players in the first year of the scholarship contract do not associate with those players in the second year”. Carron et al (1998) suggested that cohesion is a process of a group to stick together and remain united and to connect as a group of people to achieve their goal set. Cohesion is an issue within the group as a result of social identification as the two are strongly correlated. ‘People’s willingness to engage constructively with others and to respond positively to such engagement is structured by the self-categorization process’ (Tim Rees et al, 2015. Cohesion is multidimensional, there are two parts, task and social cohesion. Task cohesion is better for predicting a sport performance, teams don’t need both as long as they have one. A study differentiated between the two and stated that task cohesion is where the group members work with one another to achiever their common goals set. He also suggested that social cohesion is where the members of the group empathise with one another and enjoy each other’s company, (Carron et al., 1998; Carron and Eys, 2012). Social identification and group cohesion are very important factors within a team as they affect performance and allows the group to be …show more content…
The coach states within an interview that he doesn’t ‘know what to do’ about them training and competing as individuals. Leaders should take charge and be ‘able to transform individual action into group action’ (Hogg, 2006, p.335). An effective leader will be able to build cohesion within the group by improving their personal identities to gain social identities. Social identities and cohesion are important factors to have within a sports group to allow leaders to be successful. Hogg et al (2006) explored social identity leadership and states that to be effective as a leader it depends on how strong the group members identity themselves within the group as an important aspect of their self-concept. According to Haslam (2014) there are four dimensions of identity leadership. First of all is identity prototypically which is where the leader represents everything characteristic of that group. A leader in this stage will ‘represent the unique qualities that define the group and what it means to be a member of the group’, (Haslam et al, 2014).The second stage is identity advancement which is where the leader must champion the interests of their group. Haslam et al (2014) states it is where they need to act to prevent group failures from occurring and to contribute to the goals they set as a team and to overcome