Sports Teams

Sports teams share the properties of many other groups, in that they are composed of two or more individuals who possess a common identity, have common goals and objectives, share a common fate, exhibit structured patterns of interaction and modes of communication, hold common perceptions about group structural elements such as norms and roles, are personally and instrumentally interdependent, reciprocate interpersonal attraction, and consider themselves to be a group.

An intercollegiate tennis doubles team provides a useful example of this definition. The team contains, of course, two athletes, both of whom would describe themselves as partners on a team (common identity). Also, the two athletes would share numerous goals for both practices and competitions and [Page 834]experience success and failure as a collective (common fate). The brief, often single-word communications they exchange during a rally, their dynamic adjustments in rushing toward and retreating from the net, and their preserve signals to convey intended postserve court positions all reflect structured patterns of interaction and communication. To play doubles tennis clearly requires task interdependence. Also, the considerable time spent traveling to and from competitions and waiting for a match to begin inevitably lead to social interdependence and interpersonal attraction. Finally, and not surprisingly given all the above, the two athletes would consider themselves to be a team.

In considering themselves to be a team, the athletes exhibit one of the fundamental tenets of social identity theory, namely, social categorization. Considerable indirect evidence also highlights the presence of two fundamental con se quences of this categorizationidentification with the ingroup and comparison with/bias against outgroups. The purpose of this entry is to outline what we know about the role that sports plays in the dynamics of ingroups (teams) and their relationships with outgroups (including opponents, fans, and the media).