Team Building Grounded in Experiential Learning Theory, Relatedness, Cohesion, and Passing Performance in a Newly Formed Group of Intermediate Soccer Players

Abstract

The basic psychological need of relatedness (i.e., a sense of belonging; Deci & Ryan, 2002) has had positive relationships with performance outcomes (Gillet et al., 2009; Raabe & Zakrajsek, 2017) and perceived performance (Lourenço et al., 2022), yet the effects of relatedness on objective team performance is limited (Campbell, 2018). Although, a close relationship between relatedness and the widely studied topic of social cohesion has been found (Erikstad et al., 2018; Nascimento Júnior et al., 2019). Team-building interventions have successfully increased team cohesion on intercollegiate sport teams (e.g., Stevens & Bloom, 2003), yet there are limited team building interventions that are based on theory such as experiential learning (Kolb, 1984). Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to explore the effects of a team-building activity with theoretically grounded processing on relatedness and cohesion. Participants were nine adult male soccer players (Mage = 19.78) who engaged in a passing drill in a pretest/posttest design as part of a newly formed group. The intervention was a 20-minute, team-building activity with experiential learning model guided processing (Kolb, 1984) that targeted the basic psychological need of relatedness (Deci & Ryan, 2002). At posttest, participants had increased perceived cohesion (p = .006, d = 1.22) and relatedness satisfaction (p = .007, d = 1.19), and decreased relatedness frustration (p = \u3c .001, d = 1.79). Furthermore, there was a strong correlation between relatedness satisfaction and perceived cohesion at pretest (r = .75) and at posttest (r = .71), and a medium correlation between relatedness frustration and perceived cohesion at both pretest (r = -.63) and posttest (r = -.62). Lastly, an exploratory, non-inferential statistics analysis indicated that objective performance on a soccer passing drill may have decreased after the intervention and the majority of participants (55.55%) perceived a subjective increase in their performance. The results of the study indicate that a team building activity with guided experiential learning processing may cause positive changes in relatedness and cohesion in male soccer players, but further research is needed on effects on performance