Olympic Games, businesses: the secret of winning teams

During the 2023 World Cup, a Portuguese rugby team made up of half amateur athletes, the Wolves, won against the powerful Fiji national team, 7th in the world rankings. Why this victory? Why does one team play for the lead and not another? There are many uncertainties and uncertainty certainly contributes to the magic of matches and the appeal of major sporting events like the Olympic Games.

But performance is not purely a matter of luck. They also have to do with the way teams are composed and trained. A question of management in short, as in any organization. Without being completely transposable, the strategies used by coaches to lead their teams to victory are rich in lessons for the business world.

First of all, team cohesion is fundamental. Like many others, the Real Madrid football team of the early 2000s, the Galacticos, saw what it cost when players, however exceptional, pulled out all the stops: results at half mast, despite heavy investments. Numerous studies have demonstrated this: without group cohesion, obtaining good sporting results is a real challenge (“ Cohesion and performance in sport: A meta-analysis “, by Albert V. Carron, Michelle M. Colman, Jennifer Wheeler and Diane Stevens, Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 2002)

No wonder the best coaches work on a daily basis to bring teams together. While it could rely solely on the extraordinary quality of its rugby players, the New Zealand national All-Blacks team repeats before each match the famous Haka, a Māori ritual which anchors the team in its tradition and strengthens the links.

The “transformational leader”

In the professional world, as in the sporting world, this cohesion is crucial. And strengthening it is particularly necessary today when teleworking isolates employees, innovations create internal stress and tensions, turnover increases, preventing links from gradually strengthening, individuals from learning to work with each other, which they did to the point of sometimes developing their own vocabulary, internal to the organization, which further helped to unite them.

The Barcelona football team of the late 2000s, led by legendary coach Pep Guardiola, is a paradigm of such commitment to continuity that leads to victory. Known for its Tiki-taka game system, it was characterized by a large number of players from internal training and accustomed to cooperating for many years. Pep Guardiola was also a very inspiring “transformational leader”. The combination of these two elements made this team a perfect example of cohesion and success.

Like Pep Guardiola, the “transformational leader” in the company serves as a model, a source of inspiration for employees. He strives to support everyone’s personal development. Finally, he encourages his teams to find solutions together to the problems that arise. Such behavior strengthens relationships between employees and improves cohesion in a demonstrated manner (“ Measurement of transformational leadership and its relationship with team cohesion and performance level », by Nichola Callow, Matthew J Smith, Lew Hardy and Calum Alexander Arthur, Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 2009)

But this type of leadership alone does not lead a team to success. Once his troops are well united, the leader must also be able to inspire “cognitive” confidence. Our research, carried out with around 700 Spanish basketball players, shows that team cohesion actually has a positive impact on performance, which is all the more significant when there is also confidence in the coach’s abilities. It is only then, because they deeply believe in the possibility of success, that athletes will give the best of themselves at the crucial moment (“ Tenure matters for team cohesion and performance: the moderating role of trust in the coach », by António Cunha Meneses Abrantes, Merce Mach and Aristides Isidoro Ferreira, European Sport Management Quarterly, 2022).

The best coaches in the world, like Pep Guardiola and Didier Deschamps for football, or Vincent Collet and Phil Jackson for basketball, can have more or less likeable personalities, be more or less friendly with athletes. But they never lack technical competence. And athletes never doubt this skill, this element is absolutely decisive.

Beware of overconfidence

Wanting to inspire, strengthen ties and encourage is therefore useful in an initial phase, but it does not constitute the best choice in all situations.

Our research shows that especially when successful, continuing to encourage can be counterproductive. By studying teams from different sports, such as basketball, handball, rink hockey and futsal, we even found that a leader who is too emotionally close to his players, too systematically encouraging, could have a detrimental impact.

Such behavior can then lead players to overconfidence and complacency, making teams less critical of their own performance and less willing to change their strategies and processes. Such relaxation leads to a reduction in collective effort and a deterioration in performance.

After having savored its victory, the team must, on the contrary, quickly focus its attention on the areas which still need to be improved, and above all not slide towards self-satisfaction.

Likewise, in contemporary organizational contexts that are highly volatile, dynamic and unpredictable, where teams are very focused on performance and where effective leadership is one of the cornerstones of this performance, leaders must be able to adapt to every moment. When a commercial success has just been achieved, the share price is at its highest, and the teams are expanding, the manager must be careful not to show off. There is of course room for celebration, but this should not prevent critical analysis of performance or lead to excess confidence developing (“ Transformational leadership and team performance in sports teams: A conditional indirect model », by Merce Mach, Aristides I. Ferreira and António CM Abrantes, Applied Psychology, 2022).

It is above all the responsibility of the organizational leader to ensure that such abuses do not occur. It’s no surprise that one of the most often heard phrases in post-match press conferences is: “You have to think game by game.”