What is team cohesion? Think of it as the level of unity or “groupness” of your team. Team cohesion is the tendency for your team to stick together and stay united while trying to achieve a goal. What that goal is, you’ll have to decide. Do you emphasize fun and participation, or strive for peak performance? Either way, team cohesion is something worth considering for all types of teams.

“Team cohesion is the tendency for your team to stick together and stay united while trying to achieve a goal”

As you may have noticed while coaching, your team’s level of unity and “stick-togetherness” changes over time. The cohesion on a team can change as the season progresses, or even fluctuate before and after important events. These changes help to illustrate how team cohesion is a dynamic process—actively changing. This tendency to change is all a natural part of group interactions. As people interact, their views, relationships, and goals may shift. Because team cohesion represents the feelings of the members involved—as their feelings change, so does their level of unity.

Let’s take a closer look at what team cohesion is all about. When studying group processes, researchers tend to break team cohesion down into smaller parts so that they can get a better idea of what is really going on in a group or team.

One way to look at team cohesion is by splitting it into group interactions and individual attraction. Think about your team. Do the athletes all have a shared belief about something? How do they get along with each other? These questions address the group interactions for your team. Questions about individual attraction have to do with the opinions and beliefs that individual athletes hold about the team. Does Joe like the lane he’s in? Does Sally like the other girls in her lane? Splitting team cohesion into these two components helps to illustrate just how complex group processes can be.

Another way team cohesion is divided separates task from social aspects. Task cohesion has to do with the pursuit of performance goals. Do the athletes share similar goals? Do they agree with the level of training? These questions address the issues of group unity surrounding a particular task. Social cohesion, on the other hand, is the level of team closeness in a social sense. How do the athletes get along with each other?

These divisions of team cohesion can help you to more accurately evaluate your team’s level of cohesion. Keep in mind, that your athletes can be high in one area and low in another at the same time.

Why is this important?
Not only will learning more about team cohesion help you to better understand your athletes, but team cohesion can also help your team do a lot more! Current research suggests that team cohesion and performance have more in common than you might have thought. research suggests that a circular relationship exists between team cohesion and better performances. That is to say: increasing cohesion can help your team’s performance, and better performances help build team cohesion.

This effect is what researchers call the Cohesion—Performance Relationship. This highly studied area of group processes has undergone some major changes in the past few decades. Previously, it was only thought that only interactive sports like basketball or football could benefit from team-building activities. And in these cases, it was thought that only task cohesion would have an effect on the team’s performance.

Current studies show that a team’s unity surrounding a task, as well as a positive social climate, can both lend a helpful edge to performance in individual or team sports (Carron et al., 2002). What about teams that emphasize fun and participation? Team-building can be beneficial to these teams as well. A team that sticks together is more likely to have happy athletes, a positive social network, good stability, and the ability to work toward goals.

So whether you coach a team focused on fun, or striving for perfection; or if you coach individual or team sports—enhancing team cohesion through team-building should be on your to-do list this season!

This is excellent news for the world of swimming! With the knowledge that increasing team togetherness can actually help performance, coaches can find even more ways to improve their team in and out of the pool. The sport of swimming offers some unique challenges, however. It’s hard to develop team work in a sport where performances are individual, and the athletes have their face in the water 90% of the time. Because of this, I’ve come up with a few swimming suggestions to promote team cohesion.

Suggestion #1 – Partner Kick-Set
This activity should sound very familiar because, in fact, it’s just a kick-set. This time, however, instruct your athletes to swim side-by-side during the set. Try giving them the kick-set as a warm-up after a rest day—your athletes will appreciate the chance to catch up with their teammates. Try partnering them up with teammates they don’t usually swim with—mix it up. By allowing your athletes this chance to talk, they can develop social connections and strengthen team bonds. In addition to enhancing social relationships, kicking in pairs will cause both swimmers to hold each other accountable for hard work. By kicking head-to-head, the athletes will participate together on a specific task. Although kicking next to each other isn’t quite as group oriented as running a double-play in baseball—the swimmers will be able to work together and communicate at the same time (a rare occurrence in swimming). With this small modification, your athletes can build team cohesion without missing a beat of their training.

Suggestion #2 – Med-Ball Pass
Try this one on th
e deck before practice. You’ll have your athletes’ attention (Anything to avoid getting in!) Split the squad into two parallel lines of equal length. Instruct the swimmers that they must work as a team to pass the med-ball from one person to the next as fast as possible. The line that passes the med-ball from one end to the other first gets 100 meters less for warm-up. Try overhead or side to side passes. If you don’t have med-balls on deck, just use a kickboard.

In this activity, the swimmers must cooperate and coordinate their efforts in order to work as a team. Let them discuss a possible strategy (briefly) before beginning. The nature of swim practices does not naturally promote the development of task cohesion—the swimmers don’t really need to work together on specific tasks. This activity will provide a way to develop task cohesion during swim practice with an easily explainable challenge that can be performed right on the pool deck.

Also, check out the Happy Feet activity from GoSwim that incorporates the med-ball pass while swimmers kick vertically in the water.

Suggestion #3 – Relay Races
Relay starts should already be a part of any swim team practice regime. However, as the coach, try to emphasize the team-work required for an effective relay exchange. Tell the swimmers to pay attention to each other’s stroke pattern, let the relay groups go off on their own to practice for a few minutes. This will give them a chance to talk and get to know each other without coach around. When selecting relay squads for meets, it is obviously important to consider the fastest swimmers in the line-up. But consider choosing equally talented athletes who get along well with each other. A tight-knit relay group will help improve individual split times by increasing accountability and personal sacrifice between highly cohesive teammates.

Suggestion #4 – Partner Swimming
GoSwim has an excellent video of partner swimming. This challenging activity will force your swimmers to work together to coordinate their movements. It’s not the best activity for building appropriate swimming technique, but it will provide a fun yet difficult drill for your swimmers to work together.

The information in this article is based on the current understanding of sport psychology research in the area of team cohesion. Physical training should still be a priority; however, when augmented with the addition of mental skills techniques, athletes may gain an extra advantage in their performances.

As a coach, you are in a position to influence your athletes with your attitudes and behavior. When implementing any of the techniques described in this article, be sure to monitor your own tone of voice. If the athletes perceive that you don’t take team-building activities seriously, then neither will they. Using what you have learned about team cohesion and social processes, feel free to experiment with your own team-building techniques.

> Interested in sports psychology? Check out related articles

Carron, A. V., Colman, M. M., Wheeler, J., & Stevens, D. (2002). Cohesion and performance in sport: A meta-analysis. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 24, 168-188.