A review of literature on cohesiveness in sport groups

The purpose of this study was to review literature on group cohesiveness in sport research and to reconsider the concept of group cohesion. The review was made from three points of view: (1) experimental group or not, (2) what kind of scale was used to measure group cohesiveness, (3) What kind of sport group was studied. In general, inconsistent results in the previous studies of cohesiveness in sport group were considered to come from three causes. The first was the cause must have come from categorization of sport tasks being studied, second being the concept of cohesiveness itself, and third, the cause-effect explanations. In this study, discussions were made on the latter two causes. As the result it was found that there were inconsistencies in cohesiveness and performance relationship, and that these caused from the operational concept of cohesiveness and the lack of valid meausures. It was suggested that group cohesiveness was redefined as the total field of force which acts on members to attract in the group and to resist against the force that works to break down the group. Operationally, the force has two dimension; structure, one is interpersonal attractive force and the other is task-oriented one. Some ideas are offered for future research.