Emotional Intelligence and Transformational Leadership in Sport Coaches: The Mediating Role of Coaching Efficacy and the Relationship to Coach-Athlete Relationships

Abstract

The aim of this research was to develop greater insight into the relationships between coaching efficacy, transformational leadership, emotional intelligence in addition to coach-athlete relationships. Due to the limited research of these variables in the field of sport psychology, one-hundred and forty-seven coaches associated with Hockey Calgary completed the Coaching Efficacy Scale (CES; Feltz et al., 1999), Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ; Bass, 1998), Schutte’s Emotional Intelligence Scale (SEIS) (Schutte et al., 1998) and the Coach-Athlete Relationship Questionnaire (CART-Q; Jowett & Ntoumanis, 2004). Using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to examine the hypothetical mediational effect of coaching efficacy (CE) between emotional intelligence (EI) and transformational leadership (TFL). Additionally, coach-athlete relationships were examined to see how this measure correlated with EII, Ce, and TFL. Based on SEM, the final model had a good fit for the data, where coaching efficacy had a significant positive direct effect on transformational leadership, emotional intelligence, and coach-athlete relationships. A significant finding was that coaching efficacy partially mediated the relationship between emotional intelligence and transformational leadership. Pearson correlation analyses were also conducted and found that positive moderate correlations (r = 0.4-0.59) were found between most variables on the CES, MLQ, SEIS and CART-Q and negative weak correlations were found between the transactional leadership variables in the MLQ and variables of the CES, SEIS and CART-Q.