Capturing coaches' identity leadership within youth sport

The social identity approach discusses leadership as a repetitive and multi-dimensional group process relying on leaders' abilities to represent, advance, create, and embed a shared sense of social identity amongst their followers (Haslam, Fransen, & Boen, 2020). Purpose: To conduct an in-depth exploration of youth coaches' use of identity leadership in a naturalistic setting. Methods: The Electronically Activated Recorder was used to sample and record conversations between eight head coaches (Mage = 44.88 years, SD = 6.08; Mexperience = 11.25 years, SD = 6.18) and members of their teams, other teams, and officials during a three-day competitive youth ice hockey tournament in Central Ontario, Canada. A total of 597 audio observations captured coaches’ sport-related conversations at the tournament. We followed Fletcher's (2017) analysis guidelines involving the identification of preliminary trends or patterns in the data, theoretical redescription, and contextual considerations. Results: Coaches’ conversations aligned with the four principles of identity leadership, and thus the observational data were organized into the higher-order themes of identity prototypicality, advancement, entrepreneurship, and impresarioship. The findings illuminate the potential of identity leadership to promote and undermine youth athletes' positive experiences in sport. Conclusion: Coaches engaged in identity leadership behaviors in a variety of social environments (e.g., car ride to/from competition, locker room, during competition). The findings provide new details about identity leadership in practice and caution its potential to undermine positive athlete experiences in youth sport.