Effective leadership in adolescent sport predicts mental health and team commitment across 11 countries.

Adolescence is a developmental period marked by heightened engagement with questions of identity and belonging, which can create significant challenges for young people’s mental health and social functioning. Sport is a key context in which these identity-related challenges are negotiated, with the potential to foster a meaningful sense of social identity. However, sport environments can also involve social exclusion, bullying, and other adverse group dynamics. As a result, the quality of the social environment, and the strength of the social identity it affords, depends critically on how leaders shape and manage that environment. Guided by the social identity approach to leadership, the present study examined whether identity leadership enacted by coaches and peer leaders supports adolescents’ positive functioning, operationalised as well-being and commitment to their team, by strengthening their identification with the team. Using data from 3,540 athletes aged 12 to 17 across 11 countries, we found that identity leadership from both coaches and peer leaders was positively associated with team identification, which in turn was linked to better mental health and stronger team commitment. These associations were largely consistent across countries, age groups, and genders. Taken together, the findings highlight that adolescent development is fundamentally a process of social identity development and identify identity leadership as a robust lever for supporting healthy adolescent development.