ATHLETES’ MOTIVATION AND COACHES’ ACTUAL LEADERSHIP STYLE IN TEAM SPORTS, ADAMAWA STATE SPORTS COUNCIL, NIGERIA

The study assessed the relationship between athletes’ motivation and coaches actual leadership style in selected team sports in Adamawa State Sports Council, Nigeria. Correlational design was used for the study. The population for the study comprised all the male and female programme athletes in team sports of basketball, football, handball and volleyball in Adamawa State Sports Council, Nigeria. One hundred and eight copies of questionnaires were administered but only one hundred and four copies of questionnaires were well completed making 96.3% return rate. Purposive sampling technique was used to select one hundred and eight athletes that make the first and second teams of each of the four sports of basketball, football, handball and volleyball in Adamawa State Sports Council, Nigeria. Two instruments were adopted, modified and used for the study. The first was the Leadership Scale for Sports (LSS) used to determine coaches’ leadership styles. The second was the Sports Motivation Scale (SMS) utilized to measure athletes’ motivation in team sports. Descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation, frequency, percentage) was used to analyze the demographic information of the respondents and research questions while inferential statistics (Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient) was utilized to test the research hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The result of the study revealed that coaches’ required leadership style is significant to athletes’ motivation in team sports of basketball, football, handball and volleyball in Adamawa State Sports Council, Nigeria. Therefore, it was recommended that coaches should employ the appropriate leadership style among athletes and teams respectively