Collective efficacy in soccer teams: a systematic review

Collective efficacy, defined as a group’s shared belief about its conjoint capability to organize and execute courses of action, plays a pivotal role in understanding the dynamics of sports teams, since it influences what individuals choose to do as team members, how much they invest in motivational terms to perform actions, how much they work collectively, and for how long they persist despite failure. Through a systematic review, it was investigated how collective efficacy has been assessed in the context of soccer and which indicators, attributes, and psychometric properties have been contemplated in the instruments used. Following the PRISMA guidelines, 22 articles were retrieved through electronic databases (APA PsycINFO; SPORTDiscus; Science Direct; BVS; Web of Science; Scopus; PubMed; and Scielo), using as descriptors, in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, collective efficacy and soccer, combined by the Boolean operators AND and OR. The study did not delimit the initial year of publication for the searches carried out, including all articles found until January 14, 2021 (date of the last update). The following eligibility criteria were adopted: scientific articles published in journals; original studies, which specified the instrument used to assess collective efficacy and carried out with soccer athletes. Five instruments (FCEQ, CEQS, CEI, CEC, and CEQsoccer) that evaluated technical-tactical and psychological attributes associated with collective efficacy in soccer players were identified. In most studies, psychometric properties were restricted to content validity and reliability (internal consistency), and there were no suitable validation processes for the instruments used to measure collective efficacy, which can be considered a limiting factor for understanding this psychological construct in soccer modality.