Athlete-Perceived Coaching Behaviors: Relating Two Measurement Traditions

For more than two decades, the behavioral categories of the Leadership Scale for Sports (LSS) and the Coaching Behavior Assessment System (CBAS) have been used by a wide range of researchers to measure coaching behaviors, yet little is known about how the behavioral categories in the two models relate statistically to one another. Male and female athletes on 63 high school teams (N = 645) completed the LSS and the athlete-perception version of the CBAS (CBAS-PBS) following the sport season, and they evaluated their coaches. Several of Chelladurai’s (1993) hypotheses regarding relations among behavioral categories of the two models were strongly supported. However, many significant and overlapping correlations between LSS subscales and CBAS-PBS behavioral categories cast doubt upon the specificity of relations between the two instruments. The LSS and the CBAS-PBS accounted for similar and notable amounts of variance in athletes’ liking for their coach and evaluations of their knowledge and teaching ability.