Leadership in Sport Organizations

First paragraph: The ability to lead, inspire and motivate people is an important human characteristic. Indeed, it has been suggested that leadership is vital for effective organizational and societal functioning (Antonakis, Cianciolo, & Sternberg, 2004), with great or poor organizational, military, or sport performances frequently credited to great leadership or lack thereof. Therefore, it is not surprising that leadership has become one of the most studied topics within the social sciences (Antonakis et al., 2004). Leadership has been studied from a number of different perspectives (e.g., trait, behavioural, contingency, relational, skeptic, information-processing based approaches) which has resulted in a large number of different theories and models of leadership. Indeed, as long ago as 1971, Fiedler (1971) stated that, “there are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are theories of leadership - and there almost as many theories of leadership as there are psychologists working in the field” (p. 1)