Coach Leadership during Technical Meetings in an Italian Soccer Team

The paper explores coach leadership through a qualitative analysis of three technical meetings of an Italian soccer professional team. Adopting the perspective of discursive leadership (Fairhusrt, 2007), our research aims to show: 1. how some of the coach behaviors represented in the subscale Training and Instruction of the Chelladurai’s Leadership Scale for Sport (lss) are enacted in talk and in contextualized encounters; 2. the possible presence of other relevant leadership behaviors not yet considered in the subscale. Findings show that leadership behaviors in naturally-occurring interactions partially overlap with the dimensions of the subscale. At the same time, there are relevant dimensions related to local features of the different encounters and to the relevance of other interactions besides the more known single-coach-single-athlete relationship. Key words: sport, team, leadership, meeting, conversation analysis.