Perceived coach leadership style and psychological well-being among South African national male wheelchair basketball players.

BACKGROUND: An understanding of psychological welfare in sport is essential for the advancement of coach development frameworks and practices to meet the needs of contemporary disabled athletes.

OBJECTIVE: This study investigated the perceived coach leadership style and psychological well-being (PWB) of South African senior national level male wheelchair basketball players (n = 16, Mage  = 32.13, SD = 6.62 years).

METHODS: An exploratory, quantitative cross-sectional study design was employed in which the Leadership Scale for Sport, Subjective Vitality Scale, and Ryff's Psychological Well-being Scale were utilised to collect the data. Descriptive and inferential statistics were applied to describe and analyse the data respectively.

RESULTS: Players exhibited high levels of subjective vitality and overall PWB. The perceived coach leadership style was strongly represented by the exhibition of training and instruction, and positive feedback behaviour which were also moderately and significantly associated with players' subjective vitality scores and various dimensions of PWB. Moderate and strong negative associations were also noted between players' positive relations with other and the coach's exhibition of democratic, and autocratic leadership behaviour respectively. Essentially, hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that components of perceived coach leadership style were not found to predict PWB.

CONCLUSION: Although further investigation on national level disabled athletes is warranted, it was concluded that aspects of coaches' leadership style in conjunction with athletes' national level experience could contribute to athletes' professed states of PWB in their sport environment. This study represents essential yet persistently understudied information on selected social settings in sport.