Leadership Behaviour As Preferred By Male Athletes

Coach’s leadership behavior is a composite and diversified behavior; it guides player to reach the goal through direct or indirect ways. An outstanding coach should possess training basics and abilities to improve player’s body and mind, and also make much of using skills, strategy, and procedure to encourage player, to work willingly toward his goal. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the leadership behavior as preferred by male Football players. Thirty (n=30) male football players, representing Murshidabad districts of West Bengal in Government level state collegiate competitions held at Salt Lake Stadium, Kolkata, West Bengal; were selected randomly to serve as subjects for this study. Leadership Scale for Sports developed by P. Chelladurai (1980) was selected as a criterion tool to measure behaviour preferences of male players. To find out the significant differences among means of male players on various determined factors of preferred leadership behaviour, the means, standard deviations, analysis of variance and post-hoc test were computed. The results of the study revealed the significant difference among state level male football players in their actual leader behaviour. Male player preferred greater amount of positive feedback and lesser of autocratic behaviour from their coaches.