We are a team of leaders: practicing leadership in professional sport

HIGHLIGHTSLeadership is collectively performed through social action.Relational leadership recognizes and promotes mutual influence.Leadership is practiced through interactions and meaning making.Experience and intuition influence leadership practice.Shared understandings enhance collective performance.Guided by the emerging literature on relational leadership this paper discusses how leadership is socially constructed in the context of a professional sporting organization. An in-depth exploratory case study with a championship winning professional team was conducted for the duration of the championship season. Data was collected through interviews with various members of the organization as well as through observations of training and game sessions. The findings highlight that leadership is practiced through interactions between individuals, informed by established and ongoing relationships. Specifically, leadership is found to be practiced through verbal interactions, non-verbal interactions, and social processes of meaning making. The outlined relational approach is concerned with the collective performance of leadership through social action, revealing insights that can inform leadership practice, development, and recruitment in professional sporting organizations. The paper concludes by suggesting potential directions for research on leadership in professional sport based on conceptualizing leadership as a relational phenomenon.