運動教練的選手歸類模式：核心群歸類標準的探討

Athlete Categorization Models for Sports Coaches: Exploring the Core Members’Categorization Criteria

受到儒家文化影響的華人社會，重視人際關係的疏密，因此運動團隊中教練與選手的互動也會依關係親疏而有所不同。作為指導者，教練除了須兼顧教學、行政及團隊事務外，還面對多樣的教練─選手關係。在有限的時間與認知資源下，教練往往會對選手進行分類，並集中精力與少數核心選手建立緊密關係，依賴他們協助管理團隊。然而，運動團隊的運作與企業組織不同，儘管企業有員工歸類標準，卻無法直接套用於運動場域，而需要深入探討教練在運動場域中的選手歸類依據。本研究採用關鍵事例法，探討教練根據何種標準對核心群選手進行分類。訪談20位國內大專公開組團體運動的教練後，共蒐集297則有效事例。研究發現，教練會依據六項標準對選手進行歸類，依重要性高至低排序分別為「才能（才）」、「品格（質）」、「忠誠（忠）」、「群性（群）」、「關係（親）」及「資歷（長）」。其中，在「關係（親）」的標準中僅包含教練視角，在「忠誠（忠）」的標準中，則特別反映出教練個人與團隊層面的不同視角。

In Chinese societies deeply anchored in Confucian culture, interpersonal interactions and social relationships are organized according to differentiated ethical obligations based on interpersonal roles and relational distance, a phenomenon famously conceptualized as“the differential mode of association”. This core cultural characteristic drives corporate leaders to categorize subordinates into in-group and out-group members based on specific employee categorization standards, exhibiting favoritism and differential treatment in resource allocation and protective attitudes. While previous literature has extensively examined this social cognitive categorization process within corporate organizations, very few studies have scrutinized how this leader-member categorization dynamic operates in the specialized domain of collegiate sports teams. Under limited cognitive and time resources, coaches of collegiate division 1 sports teams often face intense cognitive loads in training and teaching. To simplify cognitive processing and optimize team functioning, coaches inevitably rely on cognitive shortcuts to classify athletes, establishing high-quality social exchange relationships with a selected few who serve as their“right-hand people”. However, athletic teams feature intensive performance pressure, a pursuit of peak performance, absolute vertical authority hierarchies, and a pervasive hierarchy of seniority culture, which altogether present structural and psychological attributes distinct from business corporations. Coupled with generational changes, generic employee categorization standards discovered in corporate organizations cannot be seamlessly extrapolated to athletic arenas. To bridge this significant research gap, this study systematically explores the internal cognitive criteria and underlying psychological taxonomy that Chinese sports coaches employ to define and delineate their core group of athletes.
To comprehensively capture coaches’internal cognitive schemas, this study adopted the Critical Incident Technique (CIT), a rigorous and systematic qualitative methodology. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with twenty professional head coaches from Taiwanese university division 1 sports team, including basketball, volleyball, baseball, and soccer, all of whom possessed a minimum of three years of athletic coaching experience. Guided by semi-structured interview prompts focusing on cognitive boundaries and resource constraints, the research team collected, segmented, and analyzed 297 effective behavioral incidents regarding athlete categorization. The empirical results demonstrate that when sports coaches categorize athletes as their core members, they do not merely rely on personal preferences but simultaneously evaluate individuals through a dual-dimensional framework: an individual (coach) perspective and a team-level perspective to perform a comprehensive functional and emotional evaluation. Through the convergence of incident summaries, this study ultimately constructed a specialized model consisting of six core categorization criteria. Ranked by incident frequency, these standards are talent (47.14%), character (16.84%), loyalty (12.46%), group-oriented attributes (8.42%), relationship (7.74%), and seniority (7.41%). Specifically, talent encompasses sport-specific athletic capabilities, team leadership, achievement motivation, and communication skills; its top ranking reflects the hyper-competitive, performance-driven nature of professional athletic system. Character focuses on exemplary moral role models and emotional maturity, exhibiting high self-discipline, which directly matches the pedagogical mission of coaches who emphasize character cultivation in education. Loyalty bifurcates into“private loyalty”(frank communication with the coach from the coach’s perspective) and“public loyalty”(task responsibility, internalization of team identity, and dedication to the collective from the team's perspective). Group-oriented attributes refer to prioritizing the collective interest, maintaining peer harmony, demonstrating interpersonal empathy, and proactively supporting teammates. Distinct from corporate supervisors, relationship in sports does not signify pre-existing network ties or demographic alignment, but rather a profound cognitive and emotional compatibility—a mutual chemistry—between the coach and the athlete. Lastly, seniority represents the time capital and structural familiarity with team traditions accumulated over time, which grants senior athletes a unique psychological prestige to stabilize team order.
This study successfully extends the leader-member categorization paradigm to the sports domain, offering two substantial theoretical contributions to indigenous differential leadership and social exchange patterns. First, this study uncovers seniority as a novel, field-specific categorization criterion that reflects the deep-rooted hierarchy of seniority within Chinese sports teams. This indigenous structure enforces a strict status boundary based on the order of entry rather than chronological age alone. This finding demonstrates how the traditional Confucian ethical tenet of“respecting the superior”(zunzun) is practically operationalized in modern sports management, proving that senior athletes’structural status and experiential capital serve as critical pillars for coaches to maintain authority, preserve collective order, and transmit organizational values. Second, while corporate managers value reciprocal personal affection or demographic alignment, sports coaches evaluate relationship based on ideological congruence and mutual chemistry. This alignment effectively enhances interpersonal attraction, minimizes interactive friction, and accelerates collective consensus. Ultimately, the integrative model of athlete categorization constructed in this study not only effectively bridges the existing literature gap but also establishes an indispensable empirical paradigm for understanding indigenous differential leadership and social exchange dynamics in sports psychology.