The Relationship among Cohesion, Transactive Memory Systems and Collective Efficacy in Professional Football Teams: A Multilevel Structural Equation Analysis

Abstract

We explored the interrelationship among cohesion, transactive memory systems (TMS), and collective efficacy in professional football. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that TMS would mediate the relationship between cohesion and collective efficacy in football teams. Furthermore, we explored the specific effects of task and social cohesion on TMS, under the hypothesis that task cohesion would be a stronger predictor of TMS akin to previous literature on the topic. Five-hundred and fifty-seven footballers (326 male and 231 female) representing 34 different teams competing in the Spanish League First and Second Division “b” participated in the study. Multi-level structural equation modelling analysis revealed that TMS mediated the cohesion-collective efficacy linkage. However, when examining the specific effects of task and social cohesion our analysis suggested that cohesion was exogenous to both TMS and collective efficacy, which in turn correlated with one another (i.e., reciprocal effect relationship). Our findings also revealed that task cohesion had a stronger impact on TMS and collective efficacy than social cohesion. Taken together, these findings suggest that the relationship among cohesion and other team processes may yield equivalent and non-equivalent models of different structural shapes. In practice, these findings highlight the need to develop integrated team dynamics interventions as cohesion influences TMS, which in turn influences collective efficacy and vice-versa. In other words, the higher the “togetherness”, the higher information sharing (TMS) and mutual trust in the team.