Research on abusive supervision of sports teams under the Chinese parental leadership: Perspective based on contingency theory

Abstract

The abusive supervision of sports teams under the characteristics of Chinese parental leadership have an adverse effect on the cognition and behavior of athletes, and promote the development and continuation of the internal mechanisms of Chinese sports teams. Based on previous literature on sports team management, this review summarizes and deduces the antecedent variables of abusive supervision in sports teams from three main dimensions: Coaches, Sports team and Athletes. At the same time, the formation mechanism of abusive supervision under parental leadership in China is analyzed. The antecedent variables include: Extreme personality, Family disagreements, Poor mental state, Sports team conflict, Ineffective leadership, Laggard management theory, Weak training atmosphere, Bad training conditions, Negative competition pressure, Extreme character, Negative training attitude and Poor performance in the match. The research conclusions are as follows: Firstly, authoritarian coaches are prone to abusive supervision due to the individual characteristics of coaches, and the abuse behavior will lead to different feedback performances of athletes, resulting in the atmosphere deviation of sports teams. Secondly, moral leadership coaches rely on virtue to engage in abusive behavior and need to avoid negative cycles within the team that affect overall performance. Thirdly, the performance behavior of benevolent leadership coaches can avoid or counteract abusive supervision, but is prone to ineffective performance. Therefore, the review believes that, in the management of Chinese sports teams, Contingency Theory should be combined to adopt different leadership behaviors based on people, time, and place, in order to achieve the best results and optimal management.

Highlights

• •Coach leadership behavior should focus on adaptive thinking.
• •Compassionate leadership coaches are prone to inefficient performance.
• •Authoritarian leadership coaches can cause deviations in the atmosphere of sports teams.

1. Introduction

Abusive supervision was first proposed by American organizational psychologist Tepper [1], which means that managers constantly show the perception of verbal or nonverbal hostile behavior, but does not include physical contact and other behavior. Derived from the dark side of leadership behavior [2], include tyrant behavior [3], supervisor aggression and supervisor damage [4], this concept is involved and adopted. After that, scholars at home and abroad have further summarized and commented on the concept definition, antecedent and outcome variables and action mechanism of abusive supervision [5]. Abusive supervision, as a negative leadership behavior, widely exists in management related organizations at home and abroad [6], and many studies have found that abusive supervision will have a negative impact on employees' attitudes and behaviors, such as weakening employees' work enthusiasm [7], job performance [2], increasing emotional internal friction [6] and feedback avoidance behavior [8].

In the context of localized management organizations in China, scholars have also made a detailed overview and explanation of the theoretical framework and negative effects of abusive supervision. Some studies have proposed that managers in areas affected by Confucian culture are more self-centered and more subjective to judge public behaviors such as ‘public criticism’ as abusive behaviors. In the context of Chinese local management with a certain parental arbitrariness, the behavior of managers to establish personal authority by suppressing the subordinate will also make the subordinate more aware of abusive behavior [9]. In this way, due to the long-term influence of Chinese traditional culture, such as the tolerance of class order and obedience to authority, the frequency of abusive supervision in various organizations in China can be seen [10].

The abusive supervision behavior of sports team parental coaches is no exception. Learning from the experience evolution of abusive supervision in enterprise management, the abusive supervision of sports team parental coaches refers to the abusive supervision of coaches due to their own personality, family, mental status, sports team conflict, leadership, sports team management philosophy, management regulations, training atmosphere, training environment, negative pressure, athlete personality and training feedback. Verbal or nonverbal hostile behavior is constantly displayed in competition performance, which is reflected through verbal or nonverbal behavior without physical contact, such as ridicule, threat, coldness and others. These behaviors act on Athletes' training enthusiasm, sports skill improvement and athletes' behavior, increasing psychological burden and resistance [1].

‘Spare the rod spoil the child’ and ‘Talented students are trained by strict teacher’ are the most popular traditional educational concepts in the history of education in China. This type of traditional educational concept may bring problems and contradictions of abusive supervision in sports teams, based on the new generation of elite athletes with different personalities, distinctive behavioral characteristics, and often accompanied by mental illness due to high competition pressure and heavy training load [11]. For example, the Chinese national youth men's basketball ‘soldier’ incident, the Beijing Shougang youth men's basketball coach's ‘slapped players’ incident, the Chinese short track speed skating team's ‘Qingdao conflict’ incident, Sun Yang and coach Zhu Zhigen's ‘teacher-disciple incident’ and others, were all exposed. Since the phenomenon of abusive supervision is so common in China, whether it is consistent with the characteristics of ‘parental leadership’ with Chinese local characteristics and affected by Chinese traditional culture and values is an urgent problem to sort out.

2. Methodology

In order to conduct this study, we collected a variety of cases of adverse effects between coaches and athletes under the management mode of Chinese sports teams in the past two decades. The data was sourced from Scopus, Web of Science™, Google Scholar, CNKI, Baidu (The largest search engine in China), and the research topic was introduced through these cases. Afterwards, by reviewing historical Chinese and English literature on abusive supervision and parental leadership, and using inductive deduction methods, the antecedents and formation mechanisms of abusive supervision in sports teams under the characteristics of Chinese parental leadership at different levels and theoretical perspectives were clarified, in order to fill the abusive supervision' s theoretical defect in the management model of Chinese sports teams.

3. Result

Under the Chinese cultural background of the national system, based on the long-term cultivation of Chinese traditional culture and values, moral norms and absolute obedience occupy the highland in the coexistence mode. Due to the different role identities and power positions in the sports team, there is a relatively obvious hierarchical relationship between athletes and coaches to a certain extent. Although there is no kinship or kinship between the two, the relationship between coaches and athletes can be summarized as ‘teacher, father and friend’ in the long run [12]. Its essence is the parental leadership sports team management model with certain local characteristics under Chinese traditional values. Based on the above, the review attempts to summarize the antecedent variables of abusive supervision in Chinese sports teams.

The existing theoretical framework for the generation mechanism of abusive supervision is mainly represented by Padilla [13], and others' poison triangle model (destructive managers, susceptible subordinates and induced environments). By sorting out the frequently cited domestic and foreign related articles on abusive supervision, the theoretical framework based on the poison triangle model is further extended to the abusive supervision of sports teams. Convert the induced environment into the daily atmosphere, training environment and competition pressure that are crucial to the management of sports teams, and form the antecedent variables at the level of sports teams. Based on the existing form and political needs of sports teams under China's national system, the antecedents of abusive supervision are sorted out from three levels: coaches, sports teams and athletes (See Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

Diagram of antecedent variables of abusive supervision.

3.1. Coach level

Coaches are the source of abusive supervision, and the factors at the level of coaches play the most direct role in abusive supervision [14]. From the perspective of individual personality traits, cognition and motivation, the influencing factors at the level of existing coaches mainly include coaches' extreme personalities, family disagreements, poor mental state, sports team conflict and ineffective leadership.

• (1)Extreme personality

For example, high Machiavellian coaches tend to inhibit interpersonal interaction, which is easy to promote irritability in Chinese parental leadership, thus showing more abusive supervision of athletes [15]. In addition, coaches with narcissistic leadership traits can also stimulate abusive supervision. It may be that under traditional Chinese cultural values, coaches with narcissistic leadership tend to be more self-centered and have clear hierarchical relationships. These factors make narcissistic coaches think that sports team management is only used to regulate athletes, and then focus on dictatorship over athletes, so that they perceive more abusive supervision [16]. Based on these characteristics, coaches with high social dominance tend to show higher status enhancement motivation and are more indifferent to others, so they are more likely to implement abusive supervision [17]. Different from the exploration of coaches' aggressive traits, Breevaart [18] turned to pay attention to the relationship between coaches and other relevant leaders' positive traits and abusive supervision, and found that the leadership traits of humility can negatively predict the abusive supervision perceived by their subordinate members, which is also reflected in the relaxed behavior characteristics of Chinese localized coaches' leadership behavior.

• (2)Family disagreements

Based on Bandura's [19] sociological perspective, human behavior is closely related to the environment. So the family of coaches is one of the important reasons that affects the abusive supervision of sports teams. As an important source of social learning, whether the coaches' family structure and family experience are healthy will lead to whether the coaches have learned aggressive behavior, and whether the relationship between childhood shadow or family discord will be projected into the relationship between athletes and coaches in dealing with the relationship with athletes, so as to implement abusive supervision [15]. Just as Garcia [20] discovered that the history of family aggression is positively related to leadership abusive supervision behavior. Moreover, the conflict between coaches' family and work will also have an impact on the abusive supervision of sports teams. For example, male coaches are more vulnerable to the adverse impact of the conflict between work and family due to the two-way pressure borne by family and work status in society, or female coaches bear more responsibilities and social attention in the family, resulting in the decline of self-restraint ability in the management of sports teams [21,22].

• (3)Poor mental state

Ego depletion theory believes that individuals need to consume their own limited resources to carry out self-control. So, from the perspective of mood and emotions, the mental state and behavior of coaches can affect the management mode of sports teams, and will also produce abusive supervision [23,24]. Through the follow-up study on the sleep condition and ego depletion of leaders in charge, it is found that insufficient and low-quality sleep will lead to ego depletion, which will lead to abusive supervision [25], so coaches face additional pressure in addition to sports. For example, the discipline of children, traffic congestion, financial pressure, and disputes with family members will all lead to abusive supervision within the team [26]. Moreover, due to the goal-oriented system of the Chinese Sports-whole-nation System, coaches often have negative emotions due to lack of rest time caused by work goals or life pressure, which are stimulated in the management of sports teams, resulting in abusive supervision. Then, in the follow-up study of leaders, it is found that leaders with high moral concepts can predict abusive supervision, but at the same time, they will also have internal friction on their psychological state, so that mental fatigue leads to emotional anxiety and aggressive behavior [27]. Therefore, based on the above analysis, the mental state of Chinese coaches has a certain impact on abusive supervision.

• (4)Sports team conflict

From the perspective of power theory, conflicts within sports teams, especially conflicts between coaches and team members, can easily lead to the humiliation and abusive supervision of coaches [28]. On the one hand, in the process of training, coaches will inevitably be psychological resistance by athletes, and then produce bad emotions [29,30]. Because there is a certain class relationship and non-relatives between coaches and athletes, attacking will bring trouble for coaches, and abusive supervision has become a channel for coaches to vent their emotions. On the other hand, coaches' lack of downward communication ability will affect their athletes' understanding, change the training plan, and is not conducive to the establishment of a good relationship between the two sides, resulting in abusive supervision [31]. In addition, athletes with a poor quality training plan easily cause coaches' emotional loss, which will have a negative impact, and further implement abusive supervision.

• (5)Ineffective leadership

The leadership of Chinese coaches determines the consistency of athletes' goals and the determination of the implementation of training plans. In the process of teaching, coaches transform leadership into teaching ability through some psychological mechanism, and leadership depends on the level of education and personal personality of coaches. And the abusive supervision of sports teams has a certain impact. So when coaches' leadership is weak, their teaching ability will decline significantly, and then deliberately take abusive supervision on athletes out of the original intention of stimulating athletes' sports ability [32].

3.2. Sports team level

Sports team management is different from coach management in terms of management object, management scope and management measures [33]. It is a superior management system for coaches and athletes, which plays a role in restricting individuals, positioning direction and ensuring logistics [34]. Therefore, the lagging management concept of the sports team, with the cold training atmosphere, bad training environment and negative competition pressure will affect the daily performance and behavior of coaches and athletes. These factors will induce coaches' abusive supervision of the sports team.

• (1)Laggard management theory

The lagging of sports team management concept is different from coach leadership, which is mainly reflected in the allocation of sports team resources and performance evaluation standards. Resource allocation includes equipment in competition and training venues, as well as material bases, such as diet, medical treatment and accommodation conditions, to meet the daily training needs of coaches and athletes. The harmonious competition system within the sports team, competition can bring excellent competition results, but also bring interpersonal internal friction problems; a good allocation of a sports team resources can improve the inner pleasure and external environment of coaches and athletes, and relatively weaken the humiliation management of coaches, and the reverse held true as well [35]. Most of the performance evaluation standards of sports teams are goal oriented, and pay attention to the combination of process evaluation and result evaluation. Too much emphasis on result evaluation may weaken coaches and athletes' enthusiasm for improving their performance, reduce training efficiency, and thus urge coaches' abusive supervision behavior.

• (2)Weak training atmosphere

Because of the independence of non-team sports, little communication with each other in some of the sports teams, which will affect the relationship between coaches and athletes at a certain level. According to the social exchange theory, exchange between people should be balanced, equal and unimpeded in order to create a good atmosphere. So, a benign cycle, coaches and athletes in a natural and pleasant atmosphere can promote more efficient advice to each other in the sports team. On the contrary, the depressing atmosphere will lead the athletes to transfer negative emotions to each other and implement deviant behaviors such as revenge, even attack [36]. This will lead to the coaches' abusive supervision of athletes to ensure normal operations. At the same time, the abusive behavior of coaches will create a tense atmosphere for the sports team and may further sink into it. From then on, negative atmosphere circulation has developed [37].

• (3)Bad training conditions

The training environment of sports teams mainly refers to the equipment of competition and training venues, as well as the material basis such as diet, medical treatment and accommodation conditions. Just as normal people need clear weather and fresh air, the training environment of sports teams is also in demand. Good conditions in high-quality resources will make athletes happy physically and mentally, relieve pressure and bad emotions, and play an important role in coaches' ability to control emotions and suppress aggressive behavior. However, when the sports team is in a bad training environment and the training demand cannot be met, it not only cannot guarantee the safety of the sports team training, but it also causes the sports team to have negative and uneasy emotions, and is particularly prone to inducing bad personalities and bad emotions, resulting in the occurrence of abusive supervision [38].

• (4)Negative competition pressure

At present, sports competition has essentially become an invisible competition in the economy, education and science and technology between countries or regions. In this situation, sports teams undoubtedly shoulder some invisible tasks. Based on the in-creasing exchanges of large-scale sports events, the intensive arrangement of competition systems such as Championships and trials, and the tension and oppression attached to individual games of great significance to the sports team, the task goals from top to bottom make the sports team not only full of task pressure in perennial training, but also often lead to insufficient preparation due to changes in the schedule, which leads to the time pressure of coaches and the sports team as a whole. When the pressure cannot become positive, the whole sports team will easily to form negative pressure with potential harm or threaten individuals. For example, when facing the full pressure of the sports team, coaches may get impatient with inactive athletes, and then abuse them [37].

3.3. Athlete level

Most Chinese athletes grow up in the local national system, which is slightly different from the training system of European and American countries [39]. Most of them with poor subjective initiative and self-discipline ability during the training, and often show negative emotions such as lazy thinking, passive execution, passive acceptance and so on. Therefore, the extreme personality, negative training attitude and poor performance of athletes may cause coaches to implement abusive supervision in Chinese national system.

• (1)Extreme character

Firstly, when Chinese athletes have negative personalities such as laziness, rebellion and anxiety, it may activate the attack tendency of coaches and it has become the target of abuse of management by coaches. Secondly, compared with ordinary athletes, athletes who are relatively introverted and emotionally depressed may be more sensitive to the abusive behavior of the coach, and even impose coaches' abusive behavior towards on others. According to personality trait theory, as the victim of abusive supervision, the introverted character of Chinese athletes will usually stimulate the abusive supervision of coaches. The research found that subordinates with low sensitivity and responsibility will show more anxiety, irritability and impulse, and also their unstable working state will stimulate the abusive supervision of supervisors [40]. As part of the sports team organization, athletes cannot complete training and competition tasks with high quality when they have cowardice and resistance to training, thus leading to the abusive supervision by coaches. In addition, research shows that the negative emotions of subordinates can positively predict abusive supervision [41]. With negative emotions, athletes are more likely have high degree of anxiety and with stressful environmental training and competition, they may subject by abusive attacks.

• (2)Negative training attitude

According to self-control theory, athletes' self-discipline ability and motivation will affect their response to coaches' abusive behavior. The influence of Chinese athletes' training attitude on abusive supervision is mainly reflected in two points. Firstly, athletes' training attitude will affect their psychological activities and cognition when facing training, and then affect abuse behavior [42]. For example, athletes with a positive training attitude will actively carry out their own psychological adjustment before high-pressure exercise, so as to avoid paranoid cognition, while athletes with a negative training attitude will stimulate their own safety-protection behavior in the face of such situations, which will lead to the breeding of bad emotions and abusive behaviors of coaches [43]. Secondly, the high sense of psychological privilege of individual excellent athletes may also unconsciously perceive some contempt or criticism of coaches as humiliation, which is also called indirectly felt humiliation management by Harris [44]. Athletes' views on their own training attitude will also affect coaches' abusive behavior. In comparison, athletes with high self-evaluation will show a series of humility behaviors to promote their positive and good mentality, and their requirements are more strict, so as to avoid becoming the object of abusive supervision.

• (3)Poor performance in the match

On the basis of the attribution theory, subordinates' response to abusive supervision depends on their attribution to leaders' abusive behavior motivation. The performance of athletes will become an incentive for coaches to abusive supervision. According to the research, the low performance of Chinese athletes violates the coaches' judgment and planning of the game, and will stimulate the abusive supervision of Chinese coaches. From the perspective of athletes, after being abused, some athletes will not stop their unsatisfactory performance in the match, still will continue to deepen this performance as an emotional catharsis and stimulate the coaches' abusive supervision, then begin a bad cycle. This resonates with the research of Simon [45], that is, the coaches' abuse behavior will lead to athletes' behavior of resisting the competition or passively responding to the competition, these behaviors will deepen the coaches' abusive behavior towards them.

4. Discussion

Parental leadership originated in the late 20th century. Based on the research of Chinese family enterprises in Taiwan, Hong Kong and some Southeast Asian countries, it was found that a unique leadership and management style: parental style [46,47]. The parental style can be traced back to Chinese traditional culture. Managers manage and care for their subordinates like fathers, while subordinates express their gratitude for the management and care of managers and absolutely obey their authority. It is a leadership style that reflects strict norms and authority, kindness like fathers and moral integrity in the atmosphere of the rule of man. Redding interviewed 72 overseas Chinese family business leaders in 1990 and found the existence of paternalism. Through further research, Farh and Cheng [48] proposed a three-dimensional model of parental leadership in 2000: authoritarian leadership, moral leadership, and benevolent leadership. Based on the above, the review attempts to clarify the formation mechanism of abusive supervision in sports teams under the leadership characteristics of Chinese parental, and conducts a comprehensive discussion based on the Contingency Theory.

Based on the above research and the current situation of China's current social development, this research explains the mechanism of abusive supervision of Chinese sports teams from the main dimension of parental leadership, and analyzes the formation mechanism of abusive supervision of Chinese sports teams under the characteristics of paternalistic leadership from the perspective of contingency.

4.1. Authoritarian leadership and abusive supervision of sports teams

Authoritarian leadership represents dignity, power and authority. As one of the main leadership styles of China's localized leadership, it highlights the deep characteristics of China's localized leadership and conforms to China's traditional values [48]. Under authoritarian leadership, coaches mostly play the role of mastering decision-making power and having dignified characteristics, so that athletes can't refuse or resist and establish a state of mind of ‘awe and obedience’ in their hearts. The performance characteristics of their sports teams are ‘obedience’, emphasizing that the authority of coaches in the sports teams is absolute and unchallengeable, exercising strict control over athletes, and requiring athletes to obey without reservation [12,49]. Therefore, scholars mostly regard authoritarian leadership as a problematic, unpopular and negative way of leadership.

First of all, Chinese saying, ‘A teacher for a day is a parent for a lifetime’ and ‘the merciful can't take command of the army’, the performance of authoritarian leadership coaches, restraining their subordinates and forcing athletes to recognize training concepts or values, will make the sports team collapse, lead to deviant behavior, and breed an uneasy atmosphere for the sports team [50]. Not only that, in the passive process, it will also cause various physiological stress reactions. When leaders' authoritarian behavior is too much, subordinates will also increasingly generate anger, causing the abusive supervision breeding.

Secondly, According to Tepper's [1] interpretation of abusive supervision, abusive supervision is urging them to be more efficient to complete tasks, and emphasizing that abusive supervision can be used as a stress source in management organizations. In addition, studies have found that there is an inverted U-shaped curve relationship between stressors, job performance and innovation, that is, appropriate stress can stimulate individual action [51,52]. It can be seen that in sports teams, the abusive behavior of coaches doesn't have only negative impact. Under the regulation of specific intermediary variables, it can also awaken the training motivation and give impartial advice to the sports team, and still play a promoting role.

Therefore, looking at previous studies from the perspective of contingency, the key to the effectiveness of leadership lies in the connection between authoritarian leadership and the management and organization situation of specific sports teams. When authoritarian leadership coaches make athletes full of pressure before the game and constantly improve their awareness of the prevention of abusive supervision, if the abusive supervision is properly grasped, it can also promote athletes' active behavior and training motivation. In addition, when abusive supervision reshapes the values and cognition of athletes, athletes with a high-level of golden mean mode thinking will also transpose thinking, when facing and evaluating the leadership behavior more active and positive [53] and recognize their own problems and self-growth from the authority of coaches, which also explains to a certain extent that the mutual self-regulation ability between high-level athletes and high-level coaches is stronger, the more powerful training or competition conditions can burst out. So as to give play to the phenomenon of better results.

4.2. Moral leadership and sports team abusive supervision

Moral leadership focuses on advocating the moral quality of leaders. In China's sports teams, coaches are usually symbols of power and virtue in the sports teams, and often use high esteem and youth to make athletes recognize and follow [54]. In particular, the athletes under the parental leadership of China's local sports teams are relatively accustomed to accepting the concept of identity hierarchy due to the influence of traditional cultures such as ‘the inferiors imitate the superiors’, ‘arranged in order of seniority by age’, so once the athletes' language and behavior are different from others in the process of sports team management. For example, when they run counter to the moral concept or professional instructions of the trainers, the coaches will be motivated to potential abusive behaviors based on their ‘high morality’ or hindered by their ‘principles’, so as to abuse athletes and sports teams.

Based on social learning theory, it is deduced from bottom to top. On the one hand, Mawritz [37] and Taylor [55] found that there is a three-layer drip model among managers, supervisors and employees. The abusive supervision imposed by the upper level will be passed from the middle level to the lower level, resulting in interpersonal deviant behavior. Therefore, the sports team should also pay attention to the increase in abusive supervision of coaches brought by the leader in charge of coaches, to avoid forming a vicious circle of abusive supervision within the sports team. Firstly, the leaders under abusive supervision will have no support and mistrust for coaches, making coaches question their work and gradually produce anomie behaviors such as slackness, which will affect the training of athletes. Secondly, the leaders' lack of authorization or exemplary role of coaches, which is particularly easy to cause coaches to have anti-work behavior and change the virtuous circle within the sports team.

On the other hand, In order to maintain the status quo and make more breakthroughs, although athletes take the moral leadership coach as an example, they are willing to follow the abusive supervision of the moral coach, and at the same time, they are also using some imperceptible hidden behaviors to avoid harm to themselves. For example, changing the strength of following coaches' different behaviors and responding to coaches' abusive supervision with negative following behaviors, but it is also easier for coaches to breed abusive emotions, which makes abusive supervision difficult to eliminate in sports teams [56,57]. It can be seen from the above that moral leadership coaches usually rely on virtue to passively implement abusive supervision, and for subtle changes to the sports team in the process of abusive supervision.

4.3. Benevolent leadership and abusive supervision of sports teams

Benevolent leadership advocates the thought of benevolence in Confucian culture, which is characterized by kindness to people and things, ‘giving kindness’ and the gratitude of subordinates. In the research on the relationship between team cohesion and team satisfaction, Chen [58] believes that the higher the benevolent leadership is, the higher the motivational climate, cohesion and satisfaction of subordinates are, and it is more conducive to trust. This coincides with the teaching concept of ‘teachers and apprentices are like the father and son’ of the sports team in the traditional culture of our country, that is, the performance of coaches in the sports team is more like ‘loving fathers’, cultivate their own character in the sports team, put people first, and achieve comprehensive care for athletes, even specific to personal life and image maintenance. It can be seen that the kind leadership behavior of parental leadership coaches in China's local context can avoid or appropriately weaken abusive supervision, which is also consistent with the conclusion of the foreign scholar Gonzalez' s [59] research on the intervention of leadership behavior with the characteristics of kindness and sincerity to reduce abusive supervision.

In addition, the study found that when the leadership's abusive supervision level is reduced, subordinates will be perfunctory to their work because they perceive that the organizational management mode is too lax, resulting in their work motivation alienation and personal output benefits being relatively low [59]. If the above situation occurs, although the coaches and athletes show mutual respect under kind leadership, the performance and atmosphere of the sports team will gradually deviate over time. The pressure given by the management or the sports team to the coaches will lead to the development of abusive supervision by the coaches. What's more, after the coaches suddenly show a certain contrast reaction, it will make the members of the sports team feel inferior and lead to abnormal performance. Thus, abusive supervision is very easy to occur.

The effectiveness of benevolent leadership coaches' management of athletes not only depends on the benevolent quality and behavior of coaches, but also requires the correlation and coupling of coaches, athletes and sports teams. Therefore, in the sports teams with localized management mode in China, kind leadership coaches should not blindly give kindness, leading to the alienation of management structure, and should effectively manage sports teams with kind leadership behavior suitable for the development of sports teams.

4.4. Contingency analysis of parental leadership behavior and abusive supervision

Through the relevant elaboration of the formation mechanism of sports team abusive supervision under the characteristics of parental leadership, it is found that sports team management is closely related to enterprise management at the theoretical construction level. At the same time, the research believes that there is no general management method applicable to all sports teams. Referring to the national system implemented in China for a long time and the pragmatic proposition ‘useful is truth’, authoritarian leadership, moral leadership and benevolent leadership in parental leadership play different roles in sports teams. To achieve the best management, sports team abusive supervision should also integrate contingency theory, act according to circumstances, and take into account the social environment, technological change, athlete quality, sports team environment and other factors [60].

Factor of Social environmental. The social environment of different times affects the values and morality of social groups, not only affects the way of communication between people, but also affects the change of educational subjects [61]. For example, the relationship between coaches and athletes in the past ‘like teachers and fathers’ has now changed to ‘like teachers and friends’. At this time, if authoritarian leadership behavior is applied to the management of sports teams, it may reverse the position of the main body of education, cause anxiety among athletes, lead to emotional resistance, and lead to abusive behavior. We should appropriately adopt the management mode of moral education and people-oriented in benevolent leadership behavior in moral leadership behavior to improve the relationship and promote management effectiveness.

Factor of Technological change. The diversification of core technology and teaching means of sports is the main path to improve the performance of leading athletes, which has a great impact on the management of sports teams [62]. Coaches cannot improve the performance of athletes with the latest technologies and means, and only rely on benevolent leadership to maintain the status quo or implement authoritarian leadership to impose pressure, it is not only easy to induce abusive supervision, but also cannot make athletes develop continuously for a long time. At this time, coaches need to strengthen their own ability to improve the height of the pyramid and rebuild the confidence of the sports team with moral leadership [59].

Factor of Athletes' qualities. Considering the differences in the educational level, personal understanding ability and behavior habits of athletes' families and themselves, the way of ‘medicine’ should be taken in the process of sports team management. In short, high-quality athletes should be flexible in management, while low-quality athletes should be on the contrary [63]. In the face of athletes with strong subjective initiative, they should implement benevolent leadership behavior, give grace and encouragement, and promote their endogenous kinetic energy. Athletes who are good at learning from each other and have a high level of education should exercise moral leadership and complement their development with virtue and professionalism. On the contrary, athletes with bad habits and poor understanding ability should implement authoritarian leadership behavior, so that athletes have a sense of awe and are always under pressure to correct bad habits.

Factors of Sports team environment. The training environment of the sports team should meet the basic requirements of sports, and the management environment should be orderly and standardized. Athletes with the same conditions in the harsh training environment or disorderly management environment will inevitably gradually subside, and it is easy to breed negative thoughts and behavior. At this time, if authoritarian leadership is carried out, humiliating management will inevitably occur, which is counterproductive [64,65]. At this time, benevolent leadership should be carried out to pay attention to athletes, give them kindness, and at the same time, moral leader-ship should be carried out to cultivate their will, so as to achieve the best effect of sports team management.

5. Research limitations and future researches

The management model of the Chinese sports team has strong regional characteristics. Although this review elucidates the formation mechanism of abusive supervision in Chinese sports teams under parental leadership, but most of the relevant theories of abusive supervision have developed from the background of Western organizations. In addition, due to the difficulty and long periodicity of obtaining abuse supervision cases and data in China, there is still a lack of localized empirical research to strengthen this core viewpoint. Therefore, future research will attempt to develop localized scales suitable for China, taking into account specific scenarios and the impact of moderating variables, to further deepen research. By the way, the combination of theory and practice will effectively serve the management of Chinese sports teams and improve management capabilities, which will also be a key direction in subsequent research.

6. Conclusion

The antecedents of abusive supervision mainly cover three levels: the coach level (extreme personality, family disagreements, poor mental state, sports team conflict, ineffective leadership), the sports team level (laggard management theory, weak training atmosphere, bad training conditions, negative competition pressure), and athlete level (extreme character, negative training attitude, poor account in the match). In general, the authoritarian, moral and benevolent characteristics of the parental leadership characteristics of China's local sports teams can explain the recognition, acceptance and avoidance in the abusive supervision mechanism in the sports teams, and the abusive supervision under the parental leadership characteristics of China is easier to send direct signals than the traditional expression, so that athletes know the expectations, standards and mentality of coaches. The review believes that on the basis of analyzing the impact of abusive supervision on the sports team, coaches should also combine contingency theory to adopt different leadership behavior management methods for the sports team according to people, time and place, so as to achieve the best utility, so as to realize the best management practice.

Data availability statement

Data is available upon request.

Ethics approval

No ethical approval is needed for this review.

Funding

This research was supported by the Humanities and Social Science Fund of Ministry of Education of China (No. 23YJC890016).

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Peng Hou: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Investigation, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Appendix A. Supplementary data

The following is the Supplementary data to this article: