Integrating leadership and followership in sport

Due to the potentially far-reaching influence of sports leaders (e.g., sports coaches, PE teachers) there has been sustained empirical investigation of leadership in the sport and exercise domain. This work has, however, almost exclusively emphasised leadership provided by coaches. Given that the leadership structure of sports teams also includes team captains, this is an obvious oversight and more recent research has investigated leadership stemming from players. Whilst an improvement, this is still removed from the reality of the combined-coach and captain-leadership experienced by team members. An important subtlety for this proposal is that captains themselves, despite being leaders are also followers.
From this illustration of leadership in sports, it is apparent that a complete picture of leadership can only emerge if the role of followers is considered; this is not unique to sports teams. Organisational literature has highlighted the fundamental issue that leadership cannot exist without the energy and enthusiasm of followers (Steffens & Haslam, 2020). Nevertheless, leader-centric analyses continue and theorising around leadership has evolved to become independent of followership. The current work seeks to rectify this by conducting integrative analyses of leader and follower behaviours exhibited at differing leadership levels, whereby the effect of a leader is examined within the context of their immediate follower.