Trust in leadership and team performance: Evidence from NCAA basketball

This study empirically examined the relationship between trust, leadership, and team performance with 2 objectives. The Ist objective was to empirically examine an assumption found in several literatures-that a team's trust in its leader has a significant effect on the team's performance. The 2nd objective was to explore a more complex and dynamic relationship between trust and team performance whereby trust in leadership mediates the relationship between past tram performance and future team performance. This relationship is derived by combining theories of trust with an attributional theory of leadership. Survey and archival data from a sample of men's college basketball teams provider; support for both hypotheses, indicating that bust in leadership is both a product and a determinant of ream performance.