Analysis of group cohesion levels and pre-competitive psychological stress in volleyball athletes.

Abstract

This descriptive study was designed to analyze the level of group cohesion and pre-competitive psychological stress of adult volleyball athletes. The subjects consisted of 155 male and female athletes from the state of Parana who played in the JAPS/ 1st division (A), and 2nd division (B). The assessment instruments used were the Group Environment Questionnaire (GEQ) and the Volleyball Psychic Stress Test (V-PST). For data analysis, the following tools were used: Cronbach’s alpha, Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Mann-Whitney, one-way Anova, and Tukey’s post hoc (p<0.05). The results revealed that athletes of division A were more negatively influenced by stress factors than the athletes of division B; in terms of individual attraction to the social group (p=0.014) and tasks (p=0016) athletes of division B had higher levels of group cohesion than athletes from division A; athletes with low social cohesion were negatively impacted by factors of "inappropriate physical conditioning" and "excessive nervousness;" athletes with low levels of cohesion for the task were negatively influenced by the factors of "Pressure from other people to win" and positively by the factor "Behavior of the fans in the game outside." It was concluded that group cohesion is demonstrated to be an intervening factor in pre-competitive stress thereby demonstrating that the higher the dispute level, the higher the negative influence of stress.