The relationship of coaches' leadership styles and gender to performance outcomes and academic performance in college basketball

The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to explore the relationship between leadership styles among head basketball coaches from NCAA Division II men's and women's basketball teams and performance outcomes and academic performance. A second purpose of this study was to explore gender differences in leadership styles and outcomes. The participants for the study included 16 men's (n= 12) and women's (n= 4) head basketball coaches from the California Collegiate Athletic Association (CCAA), which is a NCAA Division II level conference. Four of the men and all four women were head coaches of women's programs. This study employed self-reported measures including a demographic coaching questionnaire and the Leadership Scale for Sports (LSS: Chelladurai, 1993; 1998) to assess leadership behavior styles and related factors among the coaches. Performance and academic performance data were obtained from each institution. The results of a series of Pearson product moment correlations supported significant positive relationships between Autocratic leadership behavior and performance outcomes including margin of victory and rebounding margin. A 2X2 MANOVA revealed no significant gender differences among coaches for leadership behaviors. There were, however, several significant relationships among the continuous performance variables including a positive relationship between field goal percentage and points per game with total years of coaching experience. There were no correlations between coaching leadership style and overall team GPA.