ABSTRACT
Until now our journey through sport psychology has focused exclusively on the individual and how to harness personal mental skills. Undoubtedly, this work is core to sport psychology and yet individual activity represents only a small part of the story because sport is, at heart, social. With this in mind, this chapter will head in a slightly different direction, aimed at exploring the dynamics of sport teams. While previous chapters were directed towards self-improvement, here we aim to present material that will be of practical benefit especially to those who manage, coach or captain teams, to help understand the workings of teams and thereby improve performance. For those who have particular team problems to deal with right now, we recommend that you read this chapter in conjunction with the relevant ‘Team performance: Problems and solutions’ section on p. 178, where we address specific team issues head on.
