The relationship between coache's leadership styles and athletic identity in player of boy students selected teams in Urmia city.

The present study examined relationship between coach''s leadership styles and athletic identity in player of boy students selected teams in Urmia city. 75 students of high school cutting completed two instruments in this study; Leadership Scale for Sport (LSS، Chelladurai & Saleh) and athletic identity measuring scale (AIMS، Cieslak). The LSS contains 40 items that measures five dimensions of leadership styles- training and instruction، democratic behavior، autocratic behavior، social support and positive feedback. AIMS with 22 items assess the 5 dimensions of athletic identity. Social identity، exclusivity، self identity، negative identity and positive identity were dimensions of athletic identity. Cronbach''s alpha coefficient was utilized to examine the internal reliability of LSS and AIMS. Data were analyzed with one-sample kolmogrov-smirnov، and Pearson Correlation coefficient. Examining of coach''s leadership styles indicated that coaches exhibited higher in training and instruction and lower in democratic style among student teams. We found that leadership styles of social support، training and instruction، and positive feedback، were all positively correlated all dimensions of athletic identity but autocratic style didn’t correlate to dimensions of athletic identity. The result from this study and previous studies show that coach''s leadership styles and behaviors have a great effect on athletic identity and demonstrated the value role a coach plays in the development of players identity for his team that can increase athletes’ performance.