Leadership and psychological roles of female coaches in sports and physical education

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the leadership and psychological roles of female coaches. More specifically, it literally reviewed the roles of gender in coaching sports and physical education classes. Coaching clearly involves more than educating athletes about technical aspects of their sports. In attempting to elicit maximal performances from athletes under their tutelage, coaches must draw upon and develop in their athletes' resources of a distinctly psychological character. Coaching tasks such as motivating athletes, building team cohesion, facilitating the setting of goals, and communicating effectively with athletes are clearly psychological in nature. It was found that the athletes' perceptions of the correspondence between their attitudes and values and those of the coach might have a real impact in the athletic arena. Females tend to be perceived as more nurturing, sensitive, understanding and better listeners than males. This is due to males who are always competing with each other. Therefore males are not as supportive or caring as females. However, it is difficult for females to be coaches because of the negative bias against female coaches held by other male athletes. This resulted to lack of female role models. Fasting and Pfister's (2000) study indicated that male coaches are more often characterized by a “masculine” style of interaction, and the female soccer players felt that male coaches have not taken them seriously. The players seemed to be more satisfied with female because of their female style of communication. They believed that female coaches were better psychologists. It is also suggested that attitudes toward female coaches are changing, but preferences for male coaches may still exist, especially in traditionally masculine sports.

African Journal for Physical, Health Education, Recreation and Dance Vol. 13 (1) 2007: pp. 59-70