The role of emotional intelligence in sports performance

Abstract

In the realm of sports performance it is self-evident that not all athletes or teams are made equal, and thus it is understandable that researchers concerned with the quest for high performance in sport would wish to identify empirically what differentiates high from low performance. While research into the relationship between emotions and sport performance is a well established field of study, the emergence of the construct emotional intelligence has opened up a new research focus and addition to the literature. However, despite the increasingly widespread view that emotional intelligence may be linked to sports performance, currently few empirical research studies have been undertaken, and thus there is a paucity of substantive scientific evidence to support this contention. This reality was the point of departure for this thesis, with the aim of investigating the role of emotional intelligence (EI) in team sports performance. Given the centrality of the construct EI in this research line of enquiry, it was necessary at the outset to address both ontological and epistemological issues.