Sport teams spend a lot of time and money to compile the best team in order to increase
the chance to win. In this light, Lopez et al. (2017) analyzed how often the best
team won across different team sports. Interestingly, they showed that team successes
(e.g., in baseball, ice-hockey) were very little explained through team intrinsic
value or potential alone. Such results came corroborate Eccles and Tenenbaum claim,
when suggesting that an expert team is more than a team of experts (Eccles and Tenenbaum,
2004). Research on team sports, especially when aiming to understand team performance,
has thus attempted to overlook the focus on intrinsic value of sport teams (as captured
by individual talents' level), because of not accounting for “team togetherness” enough.
Historically, improving team training and team building has been targeted by the research,
mainly driven by group dynamics constructs such as cohesion, leadership, and collective
efficacy that were selected to investigate team togetherness. Other works investigated
team learning practices (e.g., verbalization and debate-of-idea) as a part of the
process of improving team intrinsic value during training, while moderate effects
have been highlighted on effective team performance during games (Chow et al., 2007).
More recently, real-time teamwork has been suggested a good candidate to explain on-the-field
team successes (Eccles, 2010). Teamwork was defined as a main team process that make
the team function effectively (McEwan and Beauchamp, 2014). Teamwork investigation
thus promises to understand team performance variability resulting from team members'
coordinated movements. In team sport, the most fruitful research on team performance
in recent years addressed team coordination processes to better understand effective
on-the-field teamwork (see Araújo and Bourbousson, 2016). Team coordination is defined
as the process of arranging individual movement of team members into a patterned collective
behavior. Team coordination implies individual players adjustments, thus needing a
theory of how individual cognitions can merge and act together.
Current Theoretical Perspectives on Team Coordination in Sport
While many theoretical framework have been initiated to study team coordination (e.g.,
Ethnomethodology for team communication on the field, LeCouteur and Feo, 2011 Natural
Decision Making approach to team sports, Macquet, 2009), three theoretical frameworks
for team coordination investigation have been identified as the most fruitful to date,
which are the social-cognitive-, the ecological dynamics-, and the enactivist- approaches
to team coordination (see Araújo and Bourbousson, 2016). In short, the social-cognitive
framework considers team coordination unfold in real-time thanks to shared knowledge
in teams. Based on the assumption of human as information processors, it describes
how shared knowledge can be represented in groups of coordinating humans (Eccles,
2016). The ecological dynamics framework considers team coordination as occurring
through affordances, in accordance with an ecological view of human cognition and
perception. In this view, team coordination depends on the collective attunement to
shared affordances founded on a prior platform of (mainly non-verbal) information
exchange (Silva et al., 2013). Finally, the enactivist approach to team coordination
considers cognition with respect to a phenomenological approach to humans, which assumes
the sense-making process to highly contribute to the human–environment coupling. In
this view, team coordination depends on how individual “own worlds” interact/interplays
in the ongoing/unfolding interaction, making (partially) shared meaningful worlds
in teams being a key phenomenon under study (Bourbousson et al., 2015).
The Investigation of Naturalistic Settings: Empirical Evidences That Question Current
Theories
In this field of research, which is actually not fully mature, some paradoxes remain,
especially in that empirical evidences obtained through naturalistic games investigation
question parts of existing theories, thus calling for future lines of investigation.
Point 1—In Theory, Expert Teams Use Implicit Coordination as a Way of Interacting
As hypothesized, expert teams use implicit coordination: team members have similar
expectations about how the action should unfold, in a way that allows them to coordinate
accurately without any explicit verbal communication (Blickensderfer et al., 2010).
Related Contradictory Evidence
In their empirical study, Lausic et al. (2009) investigated double tennis teams, as
operating on the field. Collecting audio-video recording of games, analyses focused
on the verbal communication, as occurring on the court (i.e., amount and content of
communication). The results showed that winning teams made a significant use of verbal
communication (around twice more than losing teams). They also showed that winning
points were characterized by more verbal communication than losing points. In terms
of communication content, effective plays were well-described by verbal chaining like:
“What will you do?”/“I will do that…,” suggesting that expert teams can make extensive
use of overt communication to update real-time shared understanding, in that existing
shared knowledge is probably not able to ensure a sufficient team togetherness. Future
research should further address the way in which overt communication could be the
mark of expert teams.
Point 2—Implicit Coordination Is Achieved When Shared Knowledge Is Made Available
Within the Team
As hypothesized, the more the knowledge will be shared by every team member within
the team, the more the team will coordinate effortless. In such a view, a large amount
of team knowledge should be shared by a lot of team members, while a low amount of
knowledge should be shared by only a part of members (Eccles and Tenenbaum, 2004).
Related Contradictory Evidence
In their empirical study, Bourbousson and colleagues investigated high-level basketball
naturalistic game (Bourbousson et al., 2011). Collecting audio-video recording and
related verbalization data from every implied player, analyses were focused on eliciting
the knowledge mobilized by players at every instant of the activity, and further characterizing
the amount of members sharing every identified knowledge. The results showed that
many players shared only very few elements of knowledge, while the most part of this
knowledge was shared by only few team members. This investigation thus suggested that
sharedness within the team was patterned through “local zones of sharedness,” rather
than a unique zone of exhaustive sharedness. In addition, the authors showed how existing
shared knowledge evolved during the game due to changes at the individual scale (to
maintain the accuracy of the knowledge across the game dynamics), so that “sharedness”
should be monitored/updated online. In conclusion, sharedness was assumed to be largely
complemented by on-the-field dynamical processes of sharing. Future research should
further address which type of knowledge shared prior to the game can serve to enhance
online building of shared understanding.
Point 3—Team Coordination Depends On Team Synergies Emerging From Player-Player Spatiotemporal
Relationships
As hypothesized, on-the-field team synergies are allowed by shared affordances being
available in member-member spatiotemporal relationships, so that interpersonal coordination
is mainly described as “direct” (Araújo and Davids, 2016).
Related Contradictory Evidence
In their empirical study, R'Kiouak et al. (2016, 2018) investigated high-level rowing
teams in their naturalistic performance setting. Collecting audio-video recording
and related verbalization data from each team member, analyses were focused on exploring
the extent to which their synergies was obtained through direct coordination vs. coordination
mediated by the boat. The results showed that expert rowing team coordination improved
through members becoming aware of the boat dynamics, while reducing their direct mutual
awareness. The investigation of which information teammates use to adapt and help
collective behavior to emerge thus suggests expert forms of team togetherness. These
forms can be built on a so-called extra-personal process (Millar et al., 2013), illustrating
how teamwork can be embedded in the “dynamical environment” in which it unfolds. In
such a view, shared environment, when it is dynamical enough, can serve as a glue
that holds together teammates activities, making shared affordances possibly located
out of member-member spatiotemporal direct relationships. Thus, future research should
investigate the way in which direct forms of interpersonal coordination probably need
to be complemented by indirect ones, opening avenues on identifying expert patterns
of team togetherness.
Point 4—Athletes Are Attuned to Local Information
As hypothesized, affordances rely in the player-player coordination (see above for
details), making players' individual awareness to be local (i.e., aware of the nearby
space). At the team-scale, the chaining of local individual awareness is then assumed
to be patterned enough to allow team coordination to emerge.
Related Contradictory Evidence
In their empirical study, Feigean and colleagues investigated a football game naturalistic
setting (Feigean et al., 2018b). Collecting audio-video recording and related verbalization
data from every team member, analyses were focused on the nature of information that
supported players' activity when coordinating with teammates. The results confirmed
the existing local information as a support for players' real-time adjustment, but
highlighted how team members were also able to be attuned to global information, such
as the global spatiotemporal shape they contribute to continuously emerge. In terms
of sports performance, authors suggested that the players' capability to switch between
local and global modes of regulation could be one important area of expertise to be
considered. Future research should thus further characterize the settings in which
each kind of awareness could be fruitful for team coordination.
Toward an Alternative Model of How Teamwork is Achieved in Naturalistic Settings?
Premises of an alternative model can be drawn to understand how teamwork is achieved
in naturalistic settings. While being in their infancy and needing further theorization,
following statement can serve as starting points of such an alternative view of teamwork
in sport that would be congruous with empirical evidences obtained in naturalistic
settings of team behavior: (i) perfect moments of shared understanding and mutual
awareness in action are very scarce, so that social encounter is made of “points of
connection” between teammates that are episodic, local, and indirect; (ii) coordination
is local/indirect, and alternates with moments of players global awareness (called
holoptism, see Feigean et al., 2018b for details); (iii) players' exhibit shared sensitivity
to their common environment, so that shared environment serves as a “glue” to put
various “own worlds” together and to allow for cognitive entrainment within the team;
(iv) while knowledge is useful during the game, its sharedness within the team is
low (mainly driven by preferential interactions), the dynamics of knowledge's updating
probably mattering more than the pool of knowledge shared prior to the game; (v) overt
verbal communication is needed, even in expert teams, because shared understanding
achievement within a team calls for online updating. Taken together, these statements
open avenues for research that should be challenged in the future.
Advancing the Research
From the current state of the research and its related paradoxes, we had identified
the nature of the regulation performed by team members in real time as the major gap
in current teamwork research (Bourbousson and Fortes-Bourbousson, 2016). This gap
reveals that (i) the study of team performance “inputs” is far not enough to understand
how team togetherness matters in explaining team successes; (ii) the description at
a behavioral level of how team coordination is formed, stabilized, and destroyed was
far more developed than the description of how individuals live their own interactions
and regulate their teamwork in real time in relation to what they perceive as the
team's behavioral needs. Thus, our purpose is to defend the individual regulation
performed by members in the real-time of their spatiotemporal team coordination as
a promising way of advancing the research in next years. Interestingly, a reorganization
of the research in such a direction could help develop existing but few-developed
alternative theoretical frameworks (i.e., not only the three main identified above),
as are the ones that focalize on how each individual faces the complexity of team
behavior settings (e.g., Natural Decision Making approach to team sports, Macquet,
2009; Bossard and Kermarrec, 2011) or those concerned with on-the-field social interaction
(e.g., Ethnomethodology for team communication on the field, LeCouteur and Feo, 2011).
The following section illustrates an innovative way of advancing the research in this
line. It voluntarily breaks the codes in the field, because aiming to be enactivist
while not accounting for lived experience and not being conducted with real-world
sport settings. It thus will illustrate how filling current gaps in real-time teamwork
research could call for innovative options.
Feigean et al. (2018a): An Innovative Way of Advancing the Research
As a starting point, Feigean et al. considered the panel of informational resources
shown to drive players on-the-field adjustments when coordinating together (see Feigean
et al., 2018b for details). Instances of local informational resources can support
players' activities when focalizing their perception on the ball area where the current
play is unfolding, on the movement of a single player, or when exhibiting comprehensive
awareness of the nearby space when looking at all proximal surrounding behaviors.
Such modalities of adjustment were considered local since players do not grasp any
configuration of play or multiplayer structure. In contrast, players were also able
to grasp some global configurations of play, as allowed by grasping the dynamics of
the game from a bird's eye viewpoint. It can occur when a player perceives multiplayers'
spatiotemporal shape or when he grasps density of a given space (e.g., free space).
In this mode, players could move where the density was low or attempted to avoid overcrowding
an area.
Together, these modes were called individual adjustment modalities when contributing
to collective behavior, and a recent study addressed the way in which we were able
to capture their correlates in terms of emerging patterned collective behavior (Feigean
et al., 2018a). To this end, local and global resources have been converted in two
specific adjustment modalities, and converted into a simulation model of two football
teams. Such a multi-agent system model has been built to be credible in terms of spatiotemporal
features, and was dedicated to analyse how the collective behavior evolved, depending
on both given individual adjustments modalities. When running the model, the collective
behavior had specific properties, with respect for each of the local/global mode implemented
as the agent adjustment modality. Such behavioral properties expressed in a combination
of several metrics' values (e.g., in terms of dispersion, density, geometrical center
position, etc.).
The results showed two typical team behaviors, called condensed and deployed behavior
(Feigean et al., 2018a). Condensed behavior was mainly characterized by a small surface
area. It was especially shaped as a vertical rectangle with width largely smaller
than the length. Interestingly, configuration of condensed collective behavior was
shown to be significantly the mark of a local adjustment modality. This highlights
how agents being locally coupled led to an increase of the team density in a given
part of the field. Obtained through a player by player effect, local couplings thus
gave higher score of density in only a part of the field.
Deployed behavior was accounted by a large surface area. As described by the authors,
this surface area was shaped as a horizontal rectangle with a width largely higher
than the length. In such a case, stretch index was high too, what accounted for players
being far from the centroid of the team. Interestingly, configuration of deployed
collective behavior was shown to be significantly the mark of global adjustment modality.
This shows how agents being globally coupled led to an increase of the free spaces
over the field. Agents attempted to move where the density was low or attempting to
avoid overcrowding an area and thus maintaining low density in any space. Taken together,
the results evidenced relationships between condensed or deployed collective behavior
and the local or global individual adjustment modalities, respectively. In authors'
mind, the relevance and general balance allowed through a global-mode of collective
adaptation should allow for better team functional exploration in complex settings
in which many unexpected events can occur in any area of a wide space or by any member
of a large team.
To not Conclude…
Research gaps, as suggested above, will probably require innovative ways of conducting
research. The above study conducted by Feigean et al. (2018a) illustrated how hypotheses
obtained from real-time naturalistic team coordination studies can be heuristically
advanced, while being investigated out of real-world sport settings. Multi-agents
systems and simulation studies probably affords powerful methods to increase the knowledge
about emergence in team behaviors.
Author Contributions
JB build the rationale of the opinion and wrote first half of the manuscript. MF wrote
second half of the manuscript. RS contributed to review the complete manuscript. All
authors contributed to the empirical study cited in the perspectives-section.
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial
or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.