Ideological leadership behavior: teacher-coaches in charge of school basketball teams

Abstract

The objective if this study was to identify whether the ideological leadership behavior of physical education teachers who are head coaches of male and female school basketball teams could be evaluated using the ACS System (module 3), developed and validated to identify the manner in which teacher-coaches describe their own leadership ideologies and/or student-athletes describe the behavior of their leaders, in terms of two specific dimensions of the leaders’ behavior: interactive and operative relations. The study recruited 203 student-athletes, 103 males and 100 females, and 20 teacher-coaches, members of the basketball teams at high schools from several different Brazilian states. Data were collected by applying the ACS-3 Evaluation System during official events scheduled by the State and Regional School Leagues. The data collected were input on a dedicated ACS software program and the results, in the form of predicted and observed frequencies, were analyzed using the non-parametric chi-square test. The results indicate that interactive and operative relations are fundamental dimensions of the teacher-coaches’ behavior as leaders and that the assessment system (ACS 3) offers a practical and useful technique for evaluating the ideology and leadership employed by basketball coaches. We can conclude that teacher-coaches and student-athletes of both male and female basketball teams tend to differ in their evaluation of the contribution of the two dimensions of the leaders’ behavior: interactive and operative relations. The participative authoritarian leadership style is predominant in male and female basketball teams. The liberal democratic leadership style plays practically no part of the leadership behavior and ideology employed by the teacher-coaches.