Predictive power of collective efficacy dispersion on cohesion in sport groups

Abstract

 Group-level collective efficacy can be represented by the degree of variability or consensus around the central belief of group members (Bandura, 1997, 2000). Previous studies have primarily utilized the group mean as the representation of group-level collective efficacy to examine its relationship with group effectiveness, while the predictive power of within-group variability of collective efficacy has been largely ignored (Zaccaro et al., 1995). The purpose of this study was to examine the predictive power of collective efficacy dispersion on group cohesion, which is a criterion used to assess group effectiveness. Seven-hundred twenty-four athletes from various sport teams (n=47) participated in the study. The Collective Efficacy Questionnaire for Sports (Short et al., 2005) was used to assess the group mean and dispersion of collective efficacy. In addition, we used the Group Environment Questionnaire (Carron et al., 1985; Widmeyer et al., 1985) to assess the four dimensions of group cohesion. The results indicated that collective efficacy dispersion did not predict group cohesion beyond the predictive power of the group mean. These findings have significant implications for research on collective efficacy dispersion.