Identify Barriers to Inter-personal Communication in Sport Teams using Delphi Technique

Although strong inter-personal communication can produce better results for teams, there are many obstacles in the way of an effective communication in sport teams. The present study aimed to identify some of the obstacles facing sport teams by focusing on the 'coach-athlete dyad'.
This work was a descriptive survey, which was conducted using the Delphi technique. The data was collected in two stages, as what follow. In the first stage, the theoretical sources were studied, and seven categories of factors hindering effective communications including lingual, attitudinal, conceptual, physical, environmental, semantic, and cultural barriers were extracted. In the second stage, the Delphi method was used to obtain the views of the experts regarding these factors. The studied population included two groups. The first group included the faculty members of the universities active in the fields related to this study including human resource management, communication, media, and sport management. The second one included the faculty members of physical education departments who were certified instructors and had been a national coach or athlete. The Delphi group was selected through a targeted non-random sampling, and included 20 members.
Twelve factors received the most agreement among the experts, and eight factors yielded the least consensus. The expert's highest agreement was on the lack of trust between the couch and the athletes, and the least was on the limited time during the tournaments for communication. The highest average score (2.73) was for the conceptual barrier with a standard deviation of 0.11, and the lowest average score (1.86) was related to the physical barriers with a standard deviation of 0.86.
Overcoming lingual, attitudinal, cognitive, physical, environmental, semantic, and cultural barriers will lead to an effective communication and conformity of the coach-athlete views, and consequently, improvement and success of teams.