Perceived Peer Leadership Behaviors: Links with Adolescent Female Athletes' Anxiety and Goal Orientation

Abstract

Perceived Peer Leadership Behaviors: Links with Adolescent Female Athletes' Anxiety and Goal Orientation Although many research studies have been conducted to show that coaches' behaviors and leadership styles affect their athletes' psychosocial well-being, less research has been conducted to assess the effects of peers' leadership styles and behaviors. Thus, the purpose of this study was to test whether young athletes' perceptions of their peer leader's behavior would be related to the athletes' own levels of competitive trait anxiety and achievement goal orientation. Self-report questionnaires were administered to 208 elite female adolescent (15 to 16 years old) soccer athletes who were current participants in a regional Olympic Development Program in the USA. Multivariate canonical correlational analyses revealed that athletes who perceived that their peer leaders exhibited a democratic leadership style and high levels of social support, positive feedback, and instructional behavior scored high in mastery goal orientation and moderately high in performance goal orientation. In contrast, athletes who perceived that their peer leaders exhibited an autocratic leadership style scored higher in competitive trait anxiety. These results are consistent with both achievement goal theory and social cognitive anxiety theory and also provide support for the idea that the behaviors and leadership styles exhibited by sport peer leaders do affect their teammates' levels of anxiety and achievement goal orientation.