Youth leadership in sport
It has been said that leadership is the most studied and least understood topic in all of the social sciences. Leadership is the process of providing direction, energizing others, and gaining their willing commitment to the leader’s vision. A leader creates a vision and goals and influences others to share that vision and work toward the goals. Therefore, leaders are concerned with building bridges to change and motivating others to support that vision of change. As academics state, “management is about coping with complexity, while leadership is about coping with change.”
Leaders can be found at all levels of a sports organization, but not all of them immediately stand out from the crowd. Different situations, different cultures, different organizations, at different times in life, demand different characteristics and require different skills in a leader. A young man can be great at leading his volleyball team, but lousy at leading in another setting. This happens all the time. Some excellent young sports leaders do not lead their school projects or other types of clubs they may belong to at the same time, not only because they choose not to, but also because they don’t know how. Those other settings have different sets of norms, different authority structures, and different sets of adaptive challenges that the child may not be familiar with.
On the other hand, power is the ability to influence the behavior of others. Regardless of their age, leaders wield power, and effective leaders know how to use it wisely. The types of power used by a young leader reveal a lot about why others follow that child. One of the most useful frameworks for understanding the power of leaders was developed by John French and Bertram Raven. They identified five types of power: legitimate, reward, coercive, referent, and expert power.
But in addition to the different forms of power that leaders can use, there are several different characteristics that describe how effective young leaders influence others. These features have been classified into four model categories: traits, behavior, contingency, and transformational. There is no single or simple answer as to which leadership style works best. Fifty years ago, leadership trait models were popular. Gradually, as evidence accumulated, trait models were replaced, first by behavior models, and later by contingency models. Today, the transformational model has many followers, reflecting the efforts of many leaders to transform outdated forms of organizations into more competitive ones. Trait models are based on the assumption that certain physical, social, and personal characteristics are inherent in leaders. According to this view, the presence or absence of these characteristics distinguishes leaders from non-leaders. Some of the key traits are physical, social, and personality traits. There is some common sense that supports the notion that effective leaders, young or old, have certain characteristics. However, research has not shown that traits consistently separate potential leaders from non-leaders. For example, the physical characteristics of a young baseball athlete do not necessarily correlate with his ability to achieve successful leadership later in life; they relate only to perceived leadership ability.
In short, as today’s global pace accelerates, the leadership styles applied over the past century, or even twenty years ago, differ substantially from those that need to be applied today or in 2020. To illustrate this, consider young people. members of a school. baseball team that, if he is unwilling or unable to act, the school coach will definitely have to follow the autocratic leadership style. However, as long as the trainer applies appropriate motivational and training techniques, young subordinates gradually become willing and able. Therefore, the situation is changing. This denotes that leadership must also evolve from the autocratic to the democratic style. In short, the leadership style must “adjust” to the evolution of the pending situation. As the example illustrates, sports organizations, especially those involving children, must face the future and learn from past practices by continually adapting to new and evolving instructional programs.