ABSTRACT
The effective functioning of a sport team, like many other performance groups, is contingent on how members work together as a collective. A final example of direct assessment in sport involves another season-long case study, but with an individual sport team and including more than one perspective. Findings from specific research in sport, in combination with relevant literature from the broader field of psychology, suggest the inevitability of smaller entities. A novelty within the sport literature pertains to the differentiation of smaller entities based on general valence and exhibited behaviours. One reason for the research attention in the broader literature is not only that subgroups feature saliently in the lives of most humans, but also that they can impact individuals and teams in a variety of ways, both adaptively and maladaptively.
