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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. Women in Sport
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fspor.2024.1433787
This article is part of the Research Topic Women in Coaching and Leadership View all articles

RUNNING HEAD: EFFECTIVESS OF A LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME Women Coaches Leadership Development Programme: An Evaluation Study of Programme Effectiveness

Provisionally accepted
Sophia Jowett Sophia Jowett 1Jyoti Gosai Jyoti Gosai 2Katelynn Slade Katelynn Slade 1Louise Davis Louise Davis 3,4*
  • 1 School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire, United Kingdom
  • 2 Department of Psychology,School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, East Midlands, United Kingdom
  • 3 School of Sport Sciences, Umeå University, Umeå, Västerbotten, Sweden
  • 4 Department of Psychology, Umeå University, Umea, Sweden

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Women’s sport has been experiencing continuous growth, yet the low levels of women coaches in the United Kingdom (UK) suggests that the sport is missing out on potential talent. Guided by empirical research, a women-only leadership development programme was designed and implemented by UK Sport to a cohort of 20 coaches from January to June 2021. The main characteristics of the programme included raising awareness of gender bias while at the same time focusing on women coaches’ leadership purpose and skills within a safe environment that supports coaches to build their leader identity. Kirkpatrick's (1998) four-level model was employed to guide the evaluation of programme effectiveness: reactions, learnings, applications and results. Interviews were conducted with 17 participating coaches. Content analysis of the qualitative data revealed five general categories (a) evaluations were mainly positive highlighting the aspects of the programme they liked, enjoyed and made most impression onto them; (b) learnings that impacted their work directly and immediately emerged as was the importance of on-going development; and (c) the majority of the women desired progression and transitioning to senior coach leadership positions was felt within their grasp; nonetheless, (d) challenges emerged and were described as organisational (e.g., recruitment, remuneration) and personal (e.g., work-life balance, childcare). Overall, the effectiveness of the programme was captured in its capacity to raise awareness, develop knowledge, build connections, and inspire so much so that its effects translated to many of these women moving to more senior leadership positions post-programme. Practically, this evaluation highlights that investment in individual coaches is part of the systemic change required to bring about gender balance in the coach workforce.

    Keywords: Women, Leadership, gender, coach, Workforce, Evaluation

    Received: 16 May 2024; Accepted: 24 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Jowett, Gosai, Slade and Davis. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Louise Davis, School of Sport Sciences, Umeå University, Umeå, 901 87, Västerbotten, Sweden

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.