Relationship between Servant Leadership and Empowerment in Successful and Unsuccessful National Sport Teams of Islamic Republic of Iran

Servant leadership means providing background in which followers can be ready for guidance and effectiveness. In addition to strong literature on servant leadership, this research seeks to analyze the relationship between servant leadership and empowerment in coaches of successful and unsuccessful national sport teams of Islamic Republic of Iran. This research is practical and method of statistical analysis is correlational. The population of this study was 80 persons of the coaches and leaders of successful and unsuccessful national teams of Iran. The statistical population of 66 persons was selected as the sample via random simple sampling with Morgan table. The tool of collecting data in this research was a questionnaire made by the researcher. The content validity of questionnaires of servant leadership and empowerment were confirmed by several professors of sport management of Iran’s universities. The reliability of the tool of this research was reported well by collecting data from 15 people and then analyzing it by SPSS16 software. Test results of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov Data showed that the distribution is not normal, so we used nonparametric tests to analyze the data. The results showed that there is positive and significant relationship between servant leadership and empowerment. From other results of research we can say that the perception of successful and unsuccessful team’s coaches from servant leadership is significantly different. The servant leadership and empowerment components of successful and unsuccessful team’s coaches also did not have the same rank. These results mean that successful coaches might use servant leadership as an effective strategy for influencing followers (or athletes) and maybe servant leadership was a factor in their success. On the other hand, with reference to the relationship between servant leadership and empowerment components we can say that leaders can increase capabilities of their followers by applying servant leadership. This result is particularly more noticeable in unsuccessful coaches. Literature review reveals the need for further research on the area of sport and sport management.