Self-leadership Development Program in Elite Youth Soccer Players in Japan

Teams are used in various situations. For example, job execution and business solutions are usually performed by teams. Therefore, a synergy effect is expected to result by combining limited resources within a team. What is the key factor of an excellent team? This proposition is an eternal issue for sport teams, too. On the other hand, youth generation players learn about the severity of becoming professional football players, look at the reality myself and image for the future. In other words, youth players seriously seek out the problem of how they live in the real society, it is time to establish themselves (Erikson 1959). Therefore, we conducted the Self-leadership development program which applied the organization development methods to the two elite youth soccer teams (under 18 ages) belonging to the J-League (professional football league in Japan) in 2018. One team was consisted of 27 females (Mage = 15.96, SD = 1.285). On the other team was consisted of 40 males (Mage = 15.88, SD = .791). We used Sport Self-management Skill scale (Takemura et al. 2013), the Belief in Cooperation Scale (Nagahama et al. 2009) and Collective Efficacy Questionnaire for Sports (Short et al. 2005) to examine the effects of this program from a perspective. From the analysis, it was shown that the score of Sport Self-management Skill, Belief in Cooperation and Collective Efficacy improves by this program (p < .05). These results suggest that this program is effective for promoting human resource development for elite youth soccer players, and it can be said to be a practical and academically important discovery.