Sports Teams as High-Performance Work Systems: Organizational Psychology Insights into Leadership, Culture, and Athlete Well-Being

In the field of organizational psychology, sports teams offer a powerful context for investigating how organizational dynamics shape performance, education, and well-being. Traditional research has often emphasized athletic performance, motivation, and talent development (learning and development), yet sports teams exhibit many features of complex organizations: formal and informal leadership structures, role differentiation, interdependent work, and distinctive organizational cultures. Recent studies highlight the ways that power dynamics, communication patterns, and cultural norms within sports teams mirror those found in other high-performance work environments. As such, sports teams not only provide a valuable setting for organizational research but can also generate insights for other organizational contexts seeking to foster resilience, coordination, ethical leadership, and sustainable high performance. However, many questions remain about how sports teams can balance the relentless pursuit of excellence with the imperative of supporting human dignity, health, education, and inclusion. While evidence increasingly connects psychologically safe, inclusive, and purpose-driven environments to sustainable success, significant gaps persist regarding the interplay between leadership, culture, dual career preparation, and well-being in elite sports contexts. This is specifically important in connection with the concept of athletes’ careers after leaving sports. The proper preparation for future employment needs to be based on practices applied during the stage of active engagement in professional sports. This represents a rich intersection of the organizational and educational psychology because the processes included touch numerous psychological aspects. This Research Topic aims to advance understanding of sports teams as high-performance work systems, drawing on frameworks and methods from organizational psychology. The central goal is to illuminate how leadership practices, team cultures, and organizational structures affect the performance, education, and the long-term sustainability of sports teams. It also seeks to explore how lessons from sports teams may inform broader organizational scholarship and practice in other high-pressure, team-based settings. Key questions include: • How do different forms of leadership and followership enhance or undermine team resilience and well-being? • What organizational norms and structures foster psychological safety, trust, and positive identity? • How can teams develop models of excellence that are ethical, human-cantered, and inclusive? • How should the model of athletes’ learning and development be set to respect the constraints of this environment while bringing positive results such as athletes’ engagement and skills acquisition?• How to achieve enhanced athletes’ employability after leaving sports?• How coaching pedagogy, motivational climates, and team-based learning shape identity formation, academic engagement, and long-term psychosocial development in young athletes?• What this reveals about how structured group environments foster or hinder growth beyond the sport itself?We invite contributions that test hypotheses about the links between leadership, climate, organizational processes, and outcomes such as athlete voice, burnout, recovery, and sustainable achievement.This Research Topic will consider research set at the intersection of organizational psychology, sport psychology, and educational psychology, with a focus on sports teams as working and learning environments rather than purely competitive units. Contributions may address a variety of approaches, methodologies, and settings. To gather further insights in this evolving area, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:• Leadership and followership in sports teams• Team culture, climate, and norms in high-performance environments• Psychological safety, trust, and athlete voice• Role clarity, coordination, and interdependence• Conflict, power, and status dynamics• Identity, belonging, and inclusion within teams• Social capital and relationships in sport organizations• Burnout, recovery, and sustainable performance• Organizational roots of harmful or win-at-all-cost cultures• Ethical and development-oriented models of team excellence• Appropriate models of athletes’ learning and development • Changing work structures, including professionalization and multidisciplinary support systems• Transferable lessons from sports teams for leadership, teamwork, and culture in other organizational settings Topic editors: Martin Mičiak, Katarína Stachová, Lukáš Smerek Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82898/sports-teams-as-high-performance-work-systems-organizational-psychology-insights-into-leadership-culture-and-athlete-well-being