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Coach leadership in a crisis context: investigating effective coach behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic with a process view
Get PDFIntroduction: Drawing from the crisis leadership conceptualization, this study aims to investigate coaches’ opinion patterns on effective leadership behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study used a process view to explore how coaches as leaders act in pre, during, and post-crisis phases.
Method: Thirty-two fulltime professional coaches (28 males and 4 females) from individual and team sports who experienced the entire COVID-19 pandemic from January 2020 to July 2021 in the United Kingdom were invited to express their perceptions of effective leadership behaviors. The study used Q methodology to analyze coaches’ perceptions and experiences.
Result: The study revealed that the most effective coach leadership behaviors occurred during-crisis phase, which has the most positive ratings (n = 48) compared to the pre-and post-crisis phases (n = 18). The study’s main findings highlighted different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic demand various effective countermeasures from coaches. These practical and successful experiences were summarized as: division of labor, athlete-centered, team-driven, consulting, safe environment, and online coaching.
Discussion: The findings of this study further highlight (1) the importance of coach leadership in creating a safe environment as it provides a much better platform to prepare for a pre-crisis stage, (2) that coaches should employ more positive than negative behaviors while interacting with team members more frequently especially during the crisis period, reducing athletes’ negative feelings such as anxiety and worry, and (3) that the online training-related activities and interactions during the crisis time can be expanded to noncrisis times, as a crisis event can have positive implications for the future if handled properly
Creating the conditions for psychological safety and its impact on quality coach-athlete relationships
Get PDFIn this study, we investigated the notion that giving voice to athletes is an important aspect to creating a psychologically safe environment which can then feed into maintaining good quality coach-athlete relationships where every athlete feels heard, valued, and connected. 379 athletes completed a multi-section questionnaire that assessed their (a) capacity to be open and manage conflict with their coaches, (b) perceptions of psychological safety within their team or group, and (c) perceptions of the coach-athlete relationship quality. Structural equation modelling revealed that openness and conflict management positively predicted psychological safety which, in turn, positively predicted coach-athlete relationship quality. Psychological safety was found to explain the association between athletes’ communication (i.e., capacity to be open, honest and transparent as well as manage interpersonal conflict effectively) and coach-athlete relationship quality regardless of athletes’ gender. These findings highlighted that if athletes have the capacity to have candid discussions and can navigate conflict with their coaches, then it is possible to feel psychologically safe and thus able to engage in risky interpersonal interactions (e.g., raise concerns, admit mistakes) within their group context without fear of intimidation and humiliation. Furthermore, it was revealed that such a psychologically safe group environment fostered athletes’ trust and respect, as well as commitment and cooperation with their coach. The discussion provides links to theory, research and practice
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No full textFive Dance Movement Psychotherapists reconnect and reflect on their professional practice after graduating together twenty years ago
Zhuangzian skill cultivation as a means of alternative knowledge
No full textThis project will explore the following hypotheses:
- The Laozi (daodejing) and the Zhuangzi both have in common a critique of an existential over-dependence upon rational knowledge and identification with egoself, whilst advocating an alternative form of knowledge that is derived from unmediated experience.
- This experience is had by means of a direct inquiry into reality and is hindered by the mediation of conceptual-linguistic thought.
- Alternative knowledge is transpersonal, outside the realms of embodied 'knowinghow', and rational 'knowing-that' and offers an antidote to the pitfalls of the aforementioned over-dependence.
- Direct and spontaneous inquiry may be used as a methodological hermeneutics in order to better grasp the inherent teachings of Daoist texts and overcome the incommensurability of disparate times, cultures, languages.
- In particular, the skill stories of the Zhuangzi show us means of practically
applying direct inquiry and attaining the alternative knowledge advocated within the texts.
I will begin with an overview of the complementary phenomenology and epistemologies of the Laozi and the Zhuangzi. I will undertake an exegesis of several passages of the Laozi in which two types of knowledge are contrasted, followed by an exegesis of book 2 and book 3 of the Zhuangzi, paying particular attention to the story of Cook Ding. I will explore the potential of direct inquiry as a methodological hermeneutics and the universality of such an inquiry. I will conclude the thesis by showing how, based on the interpretation and methodology I have presented, the skill stories such as 'Cook Ding', 'Woodworker Qing' and 'the Swimmer' among others can show us how such a methodology is put into practice.
I will ask the following questions:
What is alternative knowledge within the Laozi and the Zhuangzi and how are they complementary? How does this knowledge differ from rational knowledge?
What is immediate experience?
How might direct inquiry be applied methodologically and epistemologically?
The overarching question of the thesis is:
How might the 'skill stories' in the Zhuangzi reveal the acquisition of an alternative knowledge advocated within Daoist philosophy
From raped childhood to ruined childhood: developing an aesthetic of childhood trauma in digital culture from 2001 to 2018
No full textThis article examines the development of the Ruined Childhood genre of online comedy from 2001 to the early to mid 2010s. This cross-media genre of internet humour, and horror, hinges on the corruption of American childhood media for the nostalgic, and often white, masculinist coded, adult fan. This subject is explored with the intention of understanding how an aesthetic of exaggerated negative affect is both identified and expressed within a parodic online context, before situating such performances within wider systems of power, commercial identity and nationalism. This is identified as a percussor to later media panics surrounding ‘cancel culture’ and childhood media. The article then explains how an analogue aesthetic of disrupted nostalgia can be analysed and understood through Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher’s theory of hauntology. Key examples in the explored in the article include the Photoshop contests on Something Awful, Cracked Listicles, and Creepypasta lost episodes
Hacked kestrels (Falco tinnunculus) show similar patterns of post-fledging food dependency as wild reared birds: implications for best practice in release management of orphaned raptors
Get PDFOne of the challenges of wildlife rehabilitation is ensuring that rehabilitated animals have the required characteristics for survival after release. This is especially the case for orphaned animals that normally develop survival skills during a prolonged period of parental care. For raptors, this is called the post-fledging dependency period (PDP), where parents provide nutritional support to juveniles whilst they develop the physiological and behavioural characteristics required to successfully hunt prey. Orphaned raptors can be rehabilitated and released using a method termed “hacking,” a type of “soft-release” where fledglings are released from a nest box, which they learn to associate with food. This method gives the birds an opportunity to develop prey capture skills, whilst continued nutritional support is provided by rehabilitators at the box. Here, we used a hacking method to rehabilitate and release 15 orphaned kestrels (Falco tinnunculus) and observed the pattern of return to the hacking box. Of the released birds, 80% returned to the hack site for food at least once. The average number of days birds returned to the box was 12.67 ± 8.76, and there was a clear trend towards a gradual decrease in return rate (number of visits to the box per day) over time. Our observations are comparable to patterns of PDP in wild-reared kestrels and we therefore suggest that orphaned kestrels can be successfully rehabilitated in this way
!Nara harvesters of the northern Namib: a cultural history through three photographed encounters
No full textWe report on Indigenous cultural heritage and histories associated with the northern Namib desert, designated since 1971 as the Skeleton Coast National Park. Review of historical documents and oral histories from elderly people with direct and familial memories of accessing and living in the northern Namib show how places and resources were used
here by Khoekhoegowab-speaking peoples in the past. A focus of this use was the availability of valued foods, especially melons of the !nara (Acanthosicyos horridus). Three photographed encounters provide focus for a narrative connecting memories about the northern Namib that stretch back to the first European colonial journeys into this remote area of north-west Namibia. In ‘repeopling’ the northern Namib, we aim to also ‘rehumanise’ documented colonial encounters that objectified and diminished the peoples who knew, accessed and dwelled in this now protected area
Relationships with opposite-gender peers: the ‘fine line’ between an acceptable and unacceptable ‘liking’ amongst children in a Chinese rural primary school
Get PDFThis article offers new empirical data examining how Chinese children construct their understandings of heterosexuality and opposite-gender relationships with school peers. Gender differences and separation between girls and boys are commonly argued to be a ‘gender rule’ central to children’s peer cultures at school. However, this is rarely explored from children’s perspectives in China’s relatively conservative school context. Drawing on rural primary school ethnographic fieldwork with children aged 11–13 and teachers in mid-West China, the research unearthed children’s curiosity about opposite-gender relationships and unpacks how their articulation of a ‘fine line’ between acceptable ‘liking’ and unacceptable ‘liking’ between boys and girls sits within school cultures. These are evidently shaped by Chinese socio-cultural norms and teachers’ conservative attitudes towards gender. This causes children to paradoxically experience both curiosity and anxiety around romance and practicing heterosexual relationships in school. Significantly improving sexuality and relationship education in the conservative Chinese school context is also discussed