Linking Tensegrity to Sports Team Collective Behaviors: Towards the Group-Tensegrity Hypothesis

Collective behaviors in sports teams emerge from the coordination between players formed from their perception of shared affordances. Recent studies based on the theoretical framework of ecological dynamics reported new analytical tools to capture collective behavior variables that describe team synergies. Here, we introduce a novel hypothesis based on the principles of tensegrity to describe collective behavior. Tensegrity principles operate in the human body at different size scales, from molecular to organism levels, in structures connected physically (biotensegrity). Thus, we propose that a group of individuals connected by information can exhibit synergies based on the same principles (group-tensegrity), and we provide an empirical example based on the dynamics of a volleyball team sub-phase of defense.