Before supporting athletes, evaluate your coach–athlete relationship: Exploring the link between coach leadership and coach–athlete relationship

The overall quality of coach–athlete relationship has been shown to positively associate with coach leadership effectiveness on athletes’ outcomes. Nonetheless, others also showed no associations when each subdimension of coach–athlete relationship was separately examined. This study used canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to examine the complete set of correlations between coach transformational leadership (six dimensions) and quality coach–athlete relationship (six dimensions). A total of 213 athletes (122 male; 91 female) from various performance levels and sports completed a multi-section questionnaire. CCA revealed positive, negative and no correlations between the coach transformational leadership and coach–athlete relationship variable sets. For example, the Direct Commitment dimension of the coach–athlete relationship was negatively related to the Individualised Support dimension and positively associated with the High-Performance Expectation dimension of coach transformational leadership. In light of these results, we discuss whether viewing the coach–athlete relationship as an inherent dimension embedded within the conceptualisation of coach leadership is suitable and accurate.