Team Trust in Sport Teams: Methodological Implications to Advance this Field

Sport teams are often judged by their performance outcome—winning or losing. However, achieving a positive performance outcome is complex with interdependent tasks of team members and the need to coordinate their actions well. While team trust has been found to facilitate team coordination and its effectiveness in the organizational context, research on it in the sport context remains scarce. In the current book chapter, we first describe the specifics of team sport and adapt a framework about the influence of team trust, group efficacy, and longevity on shared mental models, which in turn facilitates coordination and performance to the sport context. In a second step, we derive trust measurement implications from the current measurement debate around shared mental models. We argue that research is often failing to incorporate the dynamic and fast sport situations into their measurements. Adapting the temporal-occlusion paradigm could facilitate situation-specific and indirect measurements. Lastly, we describe practical team trust implications when working with sport teams.