Exploring Vision and Visionary Leadership in Head Coaches of Canadian University Large Team Sports

Abstract

The concept of vision has been identified as a key contributor to effective leadership (cf. Donoso-Morales et al., 2017), where vision is related to both change and empowering organizational members to collaborate toward achieving goals (Sashkin, 1988). Scholars (cf. Collins & Porras, 1996) noted that regardless of the leader’s abilities and the quality of vision, the vision is meaningless unless the leader develops a ‘plan’ that includes actionable and measurable processes and an effective communication strategy. Large team sports (i.e., football, rugby) employ large roster sizes and demand from both athletes and coaches a unique and high level of specialization. As team leader, the head coach is responsible for leading all team members towards achieving a common goal. The purpose of this study was to explore if and how Canadian university large team sport head coaches conceive, develop and enact their vision to achieve their desired goals. To fulfill the study’s purpose, a pragmatic qualitative research design was used to study large team sport head coaches. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, which were thematically analyzed (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to elicit themes most useful in answering the research questions. From the analysis, the coaches’ plans to enact their vision were found to be focused on student-athletes’ holistic development. Coaches were found to use communication and role-modeling strategies to enact their respective visions for their teams. These findings suggest that large team sport head coaches have an opportunity to concurrently impact their student-athletes’ lives beyond the on-field sport experience while fielding competitive teams.