Abstract
Role ambiguity—the lack of clear, consistent information regarding one’s role, responsibilities, or position—is a critical factor in team sports in which alignment of roles is vital to collective performance and team success. However, how role ambiguity evolves over time and is managed is understudied. This qualitative longitudinal investigation examined how role ambiguities emerged and impacted the members of a National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I collegiate men’s basketball team. Working within the organizational tensions theoretical framework, data on role ambiguity were collected through participant observation and ethnographic interviews and thematically coded and analyzed. Findings indicated that role ambiguities, such as with player leadership, were influenced by numerous contextual factors and recursively influenced the meanings of some of those factors. These complexities also produced tensions, and members’ attempts to manage these tensions produced dualities that further increased role ambiguity. When members realized they could not resolve ambiguities related to their roles, they concocted unorthodox role management strategies to accomplish their responsibilities amidst the ambiguity.
Role ambiguity is an essential topic for both sports teams and sports team research. First, successful coordinated execution of role responsibilities is essential for goal achievement in sports teams (Eys, Beauchamp, & Bray, 2006). Coaches and players repeatedly discuss and work on drills in order to ensure that members are clear about what they need to do to experience success. Despite these detailed and repetitive activities, they often point to role miscues and misunderstandings as critical causes of performance shortcomings. During a recent panel discussion at the 2015 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, professional players, coaches, and general managers discussed the importance of “being on the same page,” and accepting team member roles was unanimously viewed as both one of the most difficult goals to achieve and as a central facet of effective team performance (Brenner & Keating, 2015). The panelists concurred that role alignment was “the magic ingredient” to team success. Second, with regard to the research importance of role ambiguity (beyond conceptual and empirical construct explication), role ambiguity is a key predictor and correlate of team-level dynamics (Bray & Brawley, 2002; Eys, Carron, Beauchamp, & Bray, 2005).
This investigation seeks to provide additional insights into the structural and communicative bases of how role ambiguities in a sports team emerge and evolve, impact, and are managed in a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I mid-major men’s college basketball team over the course of an entire season. This qualitative longitudinal study aims to provide an in-depth view of the complex ways role ambiguities surface within a team, the multiple and dynamic ways role ambiguity impact team members and processes, and the challenges of working through role ambiguity. This work also aligns with a recent call for “communication studies and sport” that include “group…communication dynamics” (Wenner, 2015, p. 255). In the following section, we explicate the relevance of using an organizational tensions perspective (Seo, Putnam, & Bartunek, 2004) to investigate role ambiguities in sports teams, and we offer two research questions that this study seeks to answer.
Roles Ambiguity and Sports Team Research
Scholars of sports research have defined role ambiguity as the lack of clear, consistent information regarding one’s role, responsibilities, or position (Eys et al., 2005). Findings suggest that role ambiguity has four dimensions: (a) the scope of responsibilities, (b) the behaviors necessary to carry out those responsibilities, (c) how role responsibilities are evaluated, and (d) the consequences of not fulfilling role responsibilities (Eys & Carron, 2001). This conceptualization has been used to replicate and extend findings from earlier research (e.g., Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snoek, & Rosenthal, 1964).
Sports team research findings indicate that increased role ambiguity is related to decreased levels of task cohesion and task efficacy (Beauchamp & Bray, 2001; Eys & Carron, 2001), role satisfaction (Beauchamp, Bray, Eys, & Carron, 2005), overall athlete satisfaction (Beauchamp, Bray, Eys, & Carron, 2002), and role performance in sports teams (Bray & Brawley, 2002). On the other hand, decreased role ambiguity is associated with increased satisfaction with leadership and with athletes’ intention to return to their teams (Eys et al., 2005; Romo, Davis, & Fea, 2015). Importantly, reducing role ambiguity in an interactive team setting is beneficial for the team and its members (Eys et al., 2006).
The relationship between members’ roles and the team sports context is also salient, for contextual factors have been found to affect the quality of performance (Bar-Eli & Tractinsky, 2000), members’ mentality (Balaguer, Duda, Atienza, & Mayo, 2002), and understanding of roles (Eys et al., 2005). For example, Bar-Eli and Tractinsky (2000) found that late phases of the athletic contest increased the criticality of possessions which, in turn, increased stress levels and constrained team members’ ability to execute their responsibilities. Balaguer, Duda, Atienza, and Mayo (2002) reported that in competitions, members who focused on their tasks exhibited greater performance improvement than those who focused on defeating their opponents. Finally, Eys, Carron, Beauchamp, and Bray (2005) determined that lack of prior experience in new roles, in performing and integrating tasks with different team members, in changing game situations, and in members’ hierarchy all constrained role development.
However, there is a great need for additional research on role ambiguity in the team sports context. For example, scholars of team sports have called for additional understanding of the relationship between role ambiguities and contextual factors (Eys et al., 2006), how role ambiguities affect team performance and dynamics (Bray & Brawley, 2002), and how role ambiguities evolve over time (Cope, Eys, Beauchamp, Schinke, & Bosselut, 2011). Furthermore, calls for research on communication and sport—while acknowledging the importance of individual, organizational, and media communication—ignore team communication dynamics underlying roles and context (Pedersen, 2013).
Theoretical Framework
Sports team research primarily views members’ roles through an intrapsycho-behavioral lens, treats context as relatively static, and dichotomizes the influence of context on roles (Cope et al., 2011). While these studies have produced significant findings on roles and context, such perspectives and research designs also tend to understudy the underlying complexities (McGrath & Johnson, 2003). To strengthen current understanding of role ambiguity, this investigation frames role ambiguity within the organizational tensions perspective (Seo et al., 2004) to explore a more dynamic process of emergence and impact of role ambiguity in sports teams.
First, however, it is vital to note the dynamic relationship between roles and context, especially how members’ roles must change in order to effectively address changing demands (Cranmer & Myers, 2015). One way to understand this dynamic relationship is to position roles as a set of communicative and other social behaviors performed by an individual (Fisher & Ellis, 1990). Communication, as a symbolic activity, is more than just tools to inform but is the very means of creation and transformation of social systems (Blumer, 1969/1998). This view of roles situates members’ roles as more mutable, interactional, and less fixed to the individual member (Seibold & Kang, 2008). Adopting an interactional view of role ambiguity invites a view of ambiguity emerging as a result of role negotiations that frame roles relative to different contextual factors (Scott & Myers, 2010). Members negotiate and make sense of the values subsumed within various contextual factors, and this negotiation recursively serves as the social framework for those members’ subsequent role-related actions (Wyer & Adaval, 2009).
Organizational Tensions Perspective
Investigating role ambiguity through a communication framework—in which meanings are multiple, unstable, and conflicting (Hatch, 1997)—challenges traditional frameworks that view role ambiguity as developing in a rational, ordered, and linear manner. A particularly appropriate strategy to capture the complex communication processes related to role ambiguity is to focus on dualities, tensions, and unintended or ironic consequences endemic to those processes (Seo et al., 2004). Organizational scholars have utilized dualities and tensions to investigate various role-related issues and found nonlinear, dynamic, and mutually influencing relationships among contextual factors, individual perceptions of roles, and their interactions (e.g., Tracy, 2004). Just as dualities and tensions are rife in organizational work teams, they have the potential to be equally prevalent in tightly coupled, highly organized sports teams (Beauchamp & Bray, 2001; Cranmer & Myers, 2015; Trujillo, 2012).
Dualities refer to cognitively or socially constructed polarities that pull to varying degrees, “generating a tension if one pole is emphasized and the other is suppressed” (Barge, Lee, Maddux, Nabring, & Townsend, 2008, p. 365). When members choose one side of the duality, this also instills significance to the opposite side, whereby both choice and “nonchoice” mutually influence the meaning of the situation. Tensions that emerge out of dualities signify stress, tightness, or a push–pull between poles, such as having to make choices among equally desirable or undesirable options (Putnam, 1986). Members attempting to manage the situation so as to relieve the stress or resolve the tension may produce unintended and, at times, ironic consequences that complicate their roles (Tracy, 2004). Although members may be generally knowledgeable and purposeful, certain unexpected consequences can become “perverse in such a way that the very activity of pursuing an objective diminishes the possibility of reaching it” (Giddens, 1984, p. 313).
For example, in one organizational context, Tracy (2004) reported that prison guards often found themselves renegotiating their role identities in complex ways to manage difficult work situations. When enforcing prison policies with inmates, the guards supported both role rigidity as a group and role flexibility as individuals. Tracy’s findings show that there are complex layers to role ambiguity and clarity and that the two are not necessarily easily distinguished. Her work also suggests that dualities, tensions, and unintended and ironic consequences of members’ roles will provide an in-depth knowledge of the dynamic ways that sports team context influence role ambiguity.
The present longitudinal qualitative investigation of role ambiguity in a sports team appropriates the foregoing organizational tensions framework to investigate the following research questions:
Method
Design
This investigation employed participant observation (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995) and ethnographic interviews (Spradley, 1980) to achieve an in-depth understanding of role ambiguity and to minimize the bias of each method. Data collected for one collegiate team during the entire season of NCAA Division I mid-major men’s basketball were triangulated and analyzed through an inductive analysis using coding processes and constant comparative analysis from the analytical tradition of grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1998).
Participants
Participants in this study were members of the Cardinals men’s basketball “team,” which included 18 college players, four coaches, one director of operations, two student team managers, one trainer, one strength coach, and two student athletic trainers. The players and coaches ranged in age from 18 to 56 years old. 1 Eight of the 18 players had experience from the previous season and 5 averaged playing over 20 min per game.
Participant Observation
Participant observation captures “how the activities and interactions of a setting give meaning to certain behaviors or beliefs” (Bogdewic, 1992, p. 47). Participant observation in the present study provided an unfiltered view into what players and coaches do without having to rely on what they say they do (Emerson et al., 1995). It was particularly appropriate for this investigation because teams try to maintain privacy during their practices, meetings, and other intrateam affairs in order to control information from the constant media demands (Kassing et al., 2004; Trujillo, 2012). From October to March of one season, the first author attended team meetings, practices, all home games, team meals, charity events, trips to away games, and had locker room access on game days. Participant observation allowed us not only to differentiate between action and verbal behaviors but, more importantly, to note discrepancies among these events for follow-up analysis.
Ethnographic Interviews
Ethnographic interviews were also conducted to elicit players’ and coaches’ perspectives on their teamwork processes. A particular strength of this technique is gaining purposeful information, while retaining the qualities of a friendly conversation in order to maintain the balance between keeping respondents’ trust and retrieving privileged information (Spradley, 1980). The lack of formality of this interview design enabled the first researcher to conduct frequent interviews with members over the course of the season. Short interviews (10–15 min) often occurred before and after practices and meetings, during travel and meal times, and in various locations across the campus. The interview data primarily were utilized to cross-validate and clarify situated meanings and to compare and contrast against the data from participant observation (Emerson et al., 1995). The comparative process confirmed the validity of certain findings and raised new ways to view other findings (i.e., triangulation).
Data Analysis
Data were qualitatively analyzed through a three-phase process of open coding, axial coding, and selective coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). This inductive process permitted identification of emergent patterns.
Open coding: Determining incidents that reference role ambiguity
The first phase focused on extrapolating and bracketing role ambiguity incidents from the data set. The episodic nature of practice drills, meeting topics, and game sequences aided in bracketing flows of activities into specific incidents. The second step in this phase was to establish roles and role ambiguity as the initial reference points to appropriately categorize the incidents. The researchers chose only those incidents that clearly reflected the characteristic of roles and role ambiguity (Beauchamp et al., 2002; Fisher & Ellis, 1990).
Axial coding: Identifying tensions and tension management
The second phase of data analysis focused on discovering patterns occurring within each of the dimensions. This analytical process involved connecting related incidents to better understand how the individual incidents unfolded as they did as well as their impact on the development and management of roles. An additional analytic check was taken to ensure that each incident did not artificially justify or fill the gaps of complex interactions among team members. This phase was reviewed and confirmed by the researchers and coaches and players. When discrepancies were identified, the questioned items were discussed and further analyzed until agreements were reached in this phase of the coding process.
Selective coding: Making sense of role ambiguity
The third phase of coding focused on drawing a more complex understanding of the relationship between the sports context and role ambiguity. This phase emphasized interpretations based on the intended and unintended effects of role ambiguity, management of role ambiguity, and recursive effects of role ambiguity. Interpretations were justified through patterns of members’ subsequent actions (based on their construal of their own and their teammates’ role-related circumstances). Furthermore, fragmented and juxtaposed views were further analyzed to understand the more obscure effects of role ambiguity. Findings were confirmed by several participants and an outside reviewer.
Findings
Team members’ attempts to understand, accept, and fulfill their roles on this collegiate men’s basketball team across an entire season of NCAA Division I competition produced ambiguities, biases, and misaligned interpretations. To preview the findings and by way of overview of dynamics, we report in detail below, many of these issues arose as a result of various contextual factors associated with sports teams, such as hierarchy, tradition, and media coverage of the team’s games across the season. Team members’ attempts to negotiate these issues unintentionally produced dualities, most notably performing and performancing. Ensuing efforts to manage the dualities were also constrained by contextual factors that resulted in intensified tension and that made the underlying processes of fulfilling their roles much more difficult. Ultimately, members utilized unorthodox strategies such as developing dual roles to deal with their complex situations. Each of these dynamics is described next and as answers to the two research questions this study sought to answer.
Research Question 1: How Does Role Ambiguity Emerge, Evolve Over Time, and Impact a Sports Team?
Role ambiguities emerged through the ways team members framed their roles and utilized certain contextual factors to reinforce their views. Accordingly, when more than one member attempted to determine a certain role, such as becoming team captain, the interaction between their individually framed views often produced ambiguities. These ambiguities were difficult to clarify, since each of the conflicting views was hinged to some team-relevant contextual factor, such as team history and hierarchy. Consequently, different members’ views often produced multiple understandings of roles and responsibilities. This was particularly evident and acute in the area of team leadership, as detailed next.
Emergence of ambiguities in leadership roles
Leadership became ambiguous because of the different ways team members comprehended how one became a team leader. With the departure of their best player (also the only senior) at the end of the previous season, finding a captain was one of the team’s top priorities. Veteran players understood and typically favored leadership appointments (e.g., team captain), which by team tradition were based on length of membership on the team and thus relative to position in a player tenure hierarchy. The coaches and newer players favored assigning leadership through coaches’ assessments of player performances. Typically, the two ways align, but that was not the case with the Cardinals. Given the team roster with no standout veterans and relationship histories between some of the veteran players and coaches, Head Coach Baker changed how team captains would be selected: When the final practice drill ended, Coach Baker stood above the seated players and said, “We need someone who’s going to take charge out here. I still haven’t found him. I need someone to step up, someone who is willing to sacrifice for the team, someone who’s hungry, humble, and willing to do whatever it takes to win.” Last year was tough…the fights between coach [Baker] and me…Coach wanted Dave to be the go-to-player…But this year, me and Richard are the seniors and I really expect to be seen as a leader and the go-to-player to get points for our team. Last year, he tried to do too much and disrupted our chemistry. So we’ll see if he’ll learn to play under the system…If he can do that, he can help us.
Role ambiguity evolves and creates tensions and dualities: Performing and performancing
Difficulties in resolving role ambiguities produced tensions among team members. This especially was the case when the ambiguity resulted from salient contextual factors such as the tension between Patrick and Coach Baker. The lingering tensions juxtaposed different views of members’ roles such as Patrick’s view versus Coach Baker’s view of leadership. The juxtaposed elements became a duality that recursively intensified the tension and reinforce role ambiguity.
One significant duality that emerged and reinforced team members’ role ambiguity was performing and performancing. Performing refers to the execution of a responsibility and performancing to a dramatic enactment that accentuates some quality of the responsibility (Kang, 2012). A player successfully boxing out his opponent, rebounding a missed shot, and passing the ball to the point guard are examples of a member performing his role. A player who needlessly makes a behind-the-back pass or puts on a dribbling exhibition during a game are examples of performancing or commonly referred to as “hotdogging” or “showboating.” This duality is hinged on two fundamental factors of sports teams: competition and entertainment. While face-to-face sports competition is an obvious feature of team sports, it also serves as entertainment for the general public. In certain situations, the force produced by each of these contextual factors makes it difficult for a member to navigate between performing and performancing.
Performancing undermined performing when the stakes were high for the team (e.g., rival, televised, and/or postseason games). The Cardinals members were drawn into the emotional spectacle surrounding the game and attempted to aggrandize their actions for attention, which contributed to the lack of focus on performing their tasks. Consequently, the emotionally charged members were not able to properly execute their tasks. Moreover, given the highly coordinated and sequenced actions associated with team basketball, a momentary misstep by one member had a cascading effect on the entire team. In a regionally televised game against a rival team that would decide the top spot in the conference, one player’s decision to “show off” almost cost the team the win. A momentary lapse for the player had a lasting impact on the team: The Cardinals were leading by 2 points with 12 seconds left in the game. Nathan simply had to hold the ball and let the time expire to win the game. However, he advanced the ball and attempted to dunk the ball to end the game. As he attempted to dunk, an opponent fouled him. Nathan missed both free throws with 7 seconds remaining. The opposing team rebounded the ball and called a time out. Coach Baker and Nathan’s teammates were furious. Nathan retorted by cursing at his teammates and escalating the situation. When the game resumed, the other team, in a rush to score, made a turnover and the time expired. The Cardinals won the game, but no member celebrated the win.
The duality and tensions’ impact on the Cardinals
In this instance, the duality also became more complex with the heightened moral scrutiny on Nathan’s role behaviors. Following this game, coaches were questioned by the media, team boosters, and the athletic director regarding control of the team and players’ “bad” and “selfish” habits. Consequently, coaches more forcefully constrained players’ performancing tendencies by reprimanding them when they seemed to deviate from performing their duties during subsequent meetings and practices. Some of the players, who did not condone Nathan’s playing tendencies, reinforced this enforcement by more willingly complying with the coaches’ stricter mandates. The change in expectations also meant that fulfilling one’s role now included determining the morality of one’s motives (e.g., confidence vs. selfishness). The additional level of scrutiny increased role ambiguity.
Concurrently, the Cardinals’ attempt to eliminate one type of performancing produced another type that convoluted the distinction between performing and performancing. Team members capitalized on this situation by criticizing Nathan’s decision and distancing themselves from him. Other players showed allegiance by modeling “team-first” behaviors in an attempt to increase their own playing time. Some of the players became notably compliant and responsive to the coaches’ mandates during meetings and practices. In demonstrating their commitment to develop more stringent mandates, team members engaged in another type of performancing—one that would mitigate their own embarrassment and criticisms of outside constituents. In addition, some of the players’ motivations were not to improve or clarify roles but politically motivated. Coaches were not blind to players’ motives for performancing behaviors, such as playing more disciplined, but chose to accept them because this type of performancing aligned with their own interest (e.g., “as long as they do what they’re supposed to do”). However, the tacit acceptance of these actions also increased the complexity of the duality.
Research Question 2: How Do Tension Management Strategies Impact Team Members’ Role Ambiguity?
The evolution of dualities and tensions increased role complexity. Some players tried to manage them by simply accepting the different and seemingly inconsistent role demands. This strategy increased the ambiguity, tension, and frustrations because this strategy conveyed to the coaches that players did not deeply understand their roles. Other members created dual roles to manage the ambiguities underlying their roles. The latter management strategy produced an ironic system of role management.
As the Cardinals’ season progressed, the team encountered more changing circumstances, and role expectations and assignments began to contradict one another. Rather than discuss the nuanced circumstances and develop an adaptable understanding of seemingly contradictory role mandates, the coaches opted to reprimand players for not reacting appropriately to the contextual circumstances the coaches viewed as salient. However, players viewed changing role demands—that coaches perceived as appropriate—as contradictory and unfair. The juxtaposed directives and reprimands flustered players who repeatedly were told to focus on one responsibility in one instance and another responsibility in the next instance. In one of the late season games, Stephen, the starting center, was pulled out of a game for failing to rebound a missed shot. He told Coach Maurer that he did what he was supposed to do in this zone defensive scheme, which was to “box out” the weak side and the ball was beyond his reach. This very rebounding scheme was emphasized during practices. Coach Maurer retorted, “You needed to get the ball. They scored because you didn’t” and walked away from him. These type of situations frustrated both coaches and players.
Dual roles tension management
One ironic tension management some players developed was the adoption of dual roles. Rather than confront the coaching staff about their assignments (which they saw as futile and aggravating), players fabricated two versions of themselves. One of the dual roles was for a player to engage in satisfying the coaches’ expectations on the court. No matter the degree of inconsistency, the player did his best to complete his assignment to satisfy the coaches’ expectations so as not to undermine their playing status. Drake, one of the newest Cardinals, summarized, “Things are a lot easier if you keep your mouth shut and just do what they tell you.” The other role was for a player to fulfill the role in accordance with his own perspective. The player would strive to accomplish his personal goals (e.g., scoring, being a leader, or “taking over” a game), which typically was viewed by coaches as performancing. In doing so, they further solidified the performing and performancing duality as a fundamental role management dynamic.
Contextual factors related to intercollegiate basketball further enabled this management strategy. In practices and meetings, the coaches wielded near-absolute control of all activities. Players fared well by strictly following the coaches’ orders to retain playing time during games. Rules and regulations of games, on the other hand, limited the coaches’ control over players’ actions. Hence, deviations, even those that drastically opposed the coaches’ mandates, were not reprimanded immediately during games. Moreover, when a player’s selfish role execution yielded positive results (e.g., an objectionable shot goes in and gains three points), the coaches tended to ignore the role deviation. Knowing this, players attempted to enact more performancing actions during games and risked punishment should their style of play fail to net positive results.
For instance, Patrick was able to salvage the last part of the season because of his ability to produce positive outcomes despite continuous conflicts with Coach Baker. With six games remaining in the regular season, he adopted this dual role strategy. He actually informed the first author on the bus ride to an away game that he was “just going to play his game.” He did not want to regret how this—his last—season ended. In just 15 min of playing time in that away game, Patrick scored 10 points and had three assists, three rebounds, and one steal—a noteworthy contribution for a player coming off the bench. In his next game, he contributed 17 points and the Cardinals won both games. Patrick continued to do well in postseason tournament games, particularly when his clutch free throw shooting secured wins for the team. He also earned more playing time, trust, and praises from the coaching staff. When asked about this change in the postseason ethnographic interview, Patrick said, I stopped trying to do what they’re [the coaches] telling me to do. I was just fighting myself, I wasn’t playing like me. I told myself, “don’t doubt, just play.” It’s my last season, so even if I was gonna hear it from the coaches, I was gonna go out shooting. And the shots fell for me. Patrick did well at the end of the season. He finally grew up and got what we were trying to tell him. And when that finally sunk in, he made some valuable contributions to the team’s success.
This strategy was an ironic consequence of the duality. Team members knowingly manipulated the established biases within the contextual factors and flipped the norm of performancing and performing. For instance, players ended up performancing their duties in practices and meetings because their views of their roles were disregarded and put down by the coaches. During games, players like Patrick focused more on performing their abilities, which typically were deemed by coaches as performancing. Coaches, too, became complicit in fostering this management strategy, as they accepted the ways players performed their roles in games so long as they yielded positive results. As such, the recursive interactions among members, biased views, and changing circumstances produced unconventional processes in how members managed their role ambiguities.
Discussion
The findings of this study offer three contributions to understanding role ambiguity emergence and management in sports teams. First, the findings revealed that how team members appropriated and utilized contextual meanings played a significant part in how they perceived their roles and others’ roles (i.e., symbolic role taking; Mead, 1934). Attempts to clarify ambiguities proved difficult, as members could not definitively refute the significance of contextual factors supporting an opposing view, and these unresolved disagreements further reinforced role ambiguities. For instance, team members’ misunderstanding of the “team captain” designation resulted from recognition of contextual factors that seemed to favor their own understanding (and preference) of team leadership. These findings support and extend previous research (e.g., Bar-Eli & Tractinsky, 2000) on the effects of team sports contextual factors (e.g., team history, tradition) significantly impacting role ambiguity. This investigation underscores that the ways members appropriated contextual factors for role understanding mutually influenced each other’s meanings. And as roles were contested, contextual factors adopted new meaning and became more layered, which further complicated how members perceived their own and others’ roles. In this situation, the two—roles and context—became more knotted and mutually evolving factors. This mutual evolving phenomenon suggests the need to consider sports team context as an active agent of role ambiguity.
Second, the rise of tensions and duality also revealed the depth and dynamic nature of role ambiguity. That is, ambiguity may be evident through member communication, but communication—if viewed merely as message transmission—may not be the source of ambiguity as suggested by some research (e.g., Eys et al., 2005). Rather, the tensions and duality may be an indication of more deeply rooted, even legitimate, obstacles to members performing their roles, such as juxtaposed team structure and processes that become reproduced through communication (viewed as symbolic interaction). The emergence and persistence of duality performing and performancing suggests contradicting structures, processes, and ideas across team structures (player and team), team sports (cooperation and competition), and college sports (e.g., work and play). The duality also showed that role ambiguity may not always be a static phenomenon (e.g., task confusion) but an evolving and loaded phenomenon (e.g., pretending not to know) that can transform with biased perspectives, values, and strategies.
Third, team members’ eventual adoption of dual roles reveals a role ambiguity management strategy not extensively discussed in previous research. Existing role ambiguity studies typically emphasize resolving or at least clarifying role ambiguity as leading to more effective performance (e.g., Beauchamp et al., 2002). However, in this case, coaches and players exhibited more frustration in trying to clarify situational-based role ambiguities. Ironically, both coaches and players deemed each other’s effort as “consistently communicating inconsistent expectations.” When some of the players, such as Patrick, began to adapt and role-play (i.e., dual roles) in order to manage these inconsistent expectations, coaches attributed to player growth. Furthermore, when the team tacitly accepted this method of role management, members seemed to function more effectively together.
This strategy reveals two interesting aspects of role management. First, the strategy highlights the need for clarity of dynamic situational factors related to role ambiguity. Once members understood the juxtaposing factors contributing to role ambiguity, they seemed better able to negotiate their roles—albeit more for self-sustaining and less team performance purposes. Nevertheless, it then facilitated effective player and team outcomes. Second, as discussed in the previous section, members also viewed role ambiguity as opportunities for role flexibility. Role ambiguity seemed to provide an opportunity for some members to rethink and try out either new roles or new ways to fulfill their existing roles. Consequently, reframing role ambiguity as possible opportunities to redesign roles may be beneficial to teams.
Limitations
The limitations of this investigation include one theoretical and two design issues. First, this investigation revealed one pervasive duality that profoundly influenced role processes, but this is not an exhaustive list. In many sports teams, there may be other tensions that also influence role development, such as team membership and individual autonomy as well as team member capability and inability, short- and long-term task performance, and task conflict versus relational conflict (Browning, 2007; Johnson & Long, 2002). The recursive interactions among these multiple tensions have the potential to offer a more complex interpretation of role ambiguity.
In addition, the aim of this longitudinal research design was to provide a more comprehensive view of role ambiguity emergence, evolution, and impact on individual and team performance. While the investigation was able to provide more complex insights of role ambiguity, it was challenging to balance the tension with deeply investigating any one element of role ambiguity and the interactions of these elements. We chose the latter, but this limited a more in-depth view of some interesting elements of role ambiguity, such as role conflict.
Finally, the findings of this qualitative study are based on one team over one season of a “mid-major” Division I college basketball program. Different college teams, different sports teams, and different levels of basketball teams may be affected by different contextual factors. Teams with different histories may also have to deal with different contextual factors and tensions that have additional implications for the emergence and management of role ambiguity.
Implications and Future Research
This study of Cardinals members’ experiences offers a complex and interactional view of role ambiguity that extends discussions that situate ambiguity within individuals (e.g., Eys et al., 2005). An interactional view considers contextual factors as simultaneously (re)producing different meanings and degrees of significance for different members. Future research should consider the possibility of ambiguities developing from members’ difficulties with negotiating the intersubjectivity of meaning and significance (Kassing et al., 2004). For teams, considering role ambiguity as a team-level symptom may reveal deeper structural or process inconsistencies and provide opportunities to address deeper systemic issues.
Second, given that sports team members typically play as an organized unit for a significant amount of time (Kassing et al., 2004), we echo the need for more longitudinal investigations (Cope et al., 2011) and the use of organizational theoretical perspectives (Cranmer & Myers, 2015; Kassing & Anderson, 2014) to understand better sports team communication. Our design revealed the emergence of a duality underlying role ambiguity as a result of repetitive interactions among team members about their responsibilities. In addition, the organizational tensions perspective highlighted a growing complexity of role ambiguity (e.g., performance and performancing) both within and between members. Negotiations among members to manage or resolve ambiguities became much more difficult as other factors such as morality, motives, and histories became infused with the duality (Tracy, 2004). Concurrently, our overtime investigation also revealed how role ambiguity became a symbolic platform for other team issues such as team politics, member relationships, individual agendas, and operational protocols. These deep findings were uncovered because we incorporated an organizational communication theory and longitudinal research design. We agree with other researchers that these are underutilized research approaches and have great potential for adding knowledge to sports team research.
A final area of interest is how members continue to function as a team amidst unresolved ambiguities. Most investigations focus on the negative effects of ambiguity on individual or team performance (e.g., Beauchamp et al., 2002). Few investigations focus on unexpected, or even positive, individual and team effects of role ambiguity. This study revealed a complex dynamic in which some of the players found ways to function effectively using ambiguities to their advantage. In creating dual roles, the players were able to cope with the tensions in role ambiguity and still make meaningful contribution to the team. The veil of ambiguity provided space for players to make missteps without having to be accountable for them (Eisenberg, 2006). The tensions and uncertainties that produced role confusion and frustration also created opportunities for some members to develop unconventional—even dysfunctional—strategies to enact their roles. Future research could further investigate role flexibility and its relationship to role ambiguity. For teams, this view of role ambiguity may provide opportunities to reexamine the fit between the role and the team member.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.