Home advantage and Team Cohesion

Home ground advantage is defined as: the constant finding that home teams in sports competitions win over 50% of the games played under a balanced home and away schedule.

Here are some factors that cause "home ground advantage".

1. 1
   Audience

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   We start off with the most important factor of them all. A home crowd is more supportive of the home team, there is also a greater density and volume of audience.

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2. 2
   Officials.They tend to favour the home side because of the pressure from the crowd Nevill et all (1999).

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3. 3
   Rules

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   The players on the "visiting team" are more likely to break the rules due to fatigue and pressure from the audience. This favours the home team because the visiting team is likely to be penalized more often by breaking the rules.

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4. 4
   Familiarity

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   The home team spends more time at the home ground so know more about the specific structure stadium, field, etc. They are in familiar territory. Also, they are less likely to be distracted by their surroundings compared to the visiting team who are distracted by the new surroundings and will lose some of their concentration.

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However, sometimes being at home is a disadvantage. This is an affect known as championship choke. It was based on archival and historical research by Baumeister et. al., looking at the basketball world series. They found that in the last games of the championship, the home team won the minority of games at home. Below is a laboratory study by Butler & Baumeister into this.

Team cohesion is a tendency for a group to stick together and remain united in the pursuit of common goals. It can be divided into two types.

1. 1
   Social Cohesion is how well a team get along with each other personally

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   An example of this would be going to the pub together after training, or conversely a team who rarely talked to each other.

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2. 2
   Task Cohesion

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   This is the extent to which members of the team work together.

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Team cohesion is affected by various factors, including:

1. 1
   Popularity

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   If a sport is unusual (like Baseball in the UK or netball in US) then there will be few people who want to play, you'd have to travel quite a distance to get to the facilities, and it would be difficult to find teams to play against.

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2. 2
   'Homogeneity [ho-mo-jen-ay-ih-ti]

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   This word means 'all being the same'. If the team members are similar in terms of social background, attitudes, ability, commitment and personality; then there will be better cohesion.

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3. 3
   Leadership

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   The captains and leaders of teams should be constant. The players must agree with and respect the leader.

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4. 4
   Team size

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   Larger teams have been found to have lower cohesion, this is because a larger team is more likely to divide into sub-groups.

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All of this theory may be slightly useful for team captains, but now we look at the one thing that all teams strive for: success!. Does good team cohesion lead to success, and does success lead to cohesion? Martens and Peterson (1971) proposed a circular model to show how success, satisfaction and performance relate.

There is no real reason why the arrows should go that way round; they could just as easily go in the other direction as well. The two studies below provides evidence for these two views.

As you will have learned by studying social facilitation, the types of sport are an important factor. Cox (1990) suggested sports should be categorized into:

• High interaction (basketball, rugby, football).
• Low interaction (swimming, shooting, cycling).

This tells us that high team cohesion in a low interaction sport have poorer performances. This term is used because the performance is not reduced, it is just not as affected.

If you need to reference this article in your work, you can copy-paste the following depending on your required format:

APA (American Psychological Association)
Home advantage and Team Cohesion. (2017). In ScienceAid. Retrieved Apr 19, 2024, from https://scienceaid.net/psychology/social/homeadvantage.html

MLA (Modern Language Association) "Home advantage and Team Cohesion." ScienceAid, scienceaid.net/psychology/social/homeadvantage.html Accessed 19 Apr 2024.

Chicago / Turabian ScienceAid.net. "Home advantage and Team Cohesion." Accessed Apr 19, 2024. https://scienceaid.net/psychology/social/homeadvantage.html.

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