@article{ref1,
title="Self-organization processes in field-invasion team sports : implications for leadership",
journal="Sports medicine",
year="2013",
author="Passos, Pedro and Araújo, Duarte and Davids, Keith",
volume="43",
number="1",
pages="1-7",
abstract="In nature, the interactions between agents in a complex system (fish schools; colonies of ants) are governed by information that is locally created. Each agent self-organizes (adjusts) its behaviour, not through a central command centre, but based on variables that emerge from the interactions with other system agents in the neighbourhood. Self-organization has been proposed as a mechanism to explain the tendencies for individual performers to interact with each other in field-invasion sports teams, displaying functional co-adaptive behaviours, without the need for central control. The relevance of self-organization as a mechanism that explains pattern-forming dynamics within attacker-defender interactions in field-invasion sports has been sustained in the literature. Nonetheless, other levels of interpersonal coordination, such as intra-team interactions, still raise important questions, particularly with reference to the role of leadership or match strategies that have been prescribed in advance by a coach. The existence of key properties of complex systems, such as system degeneracy, nonlinearity or contextual dependency, suggests that self-organization is a functional mechanism to explain the emergence of interpersonal coordination tendencies within intra-team interactions. In this opinion article we propose how leadership may act as a key constraint on the emergent, self-organizational tendencies of performers in field-invasion sports.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0112-1642",
doi="10.1007/s40279-012-0001-1",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40279-012-0001-1"
}