the relationship between coaches’ leadership styles and power sources in iranian super league volleyball teams from players’ point of view

the aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between leadership style and power source of coaches in iranian super league volleyball teams from players’ point of view as well as to prioritize leadership styles and power sources in coaches of all teams. for this purpose, all iranian super league volleyball team players in season 2008-2009 completed the leadership scale for sport (chelladurai & saleh, 1980) and power source questionnaire (sussman & deep, 1989). the validity of these questionnaires was confirmed by 10 sport management professors, and reliability coefficient was respectively acquired through cronbach's alpha ( =0.83) and kuder-richardson 21 (r21=0.70). out of 157 questionnaires distributed, 142 questionnaires were received and analyzed with k-s test, friedman test and spearman correlation coefficient. results showed that leadership styles of coaches were prioritized as ‘instruction and training’, ‘social support’, ‘positive feedback’, ‘autocratic’, and ‘democratic’. power sources of coaches also were prioritized as ‘expert’, ‘legitimate’, ‘referent’, ‘reward’, and ‘coercive powers’. there was a significant correlation between ‘instruction and training’ style with ‘expert power’ (r=0.173, p?0.05) and also between ‘social support’ style with ‘expert power’ (r=0.165, p? 0.05). regarding hersey and blanchard theory of situational leadership, the results were justifiable. regarding the research domain, more researches on different sport societies are required to achieve better judgment and results.