A comprehensive analysis of the integration of team research between sport psychology and management

Both sports and organizations rely on teams. As such, the sport psychology and management literatures have contributed greatly to our understanding of team functioning. Despite this, previous reviews based on subsets of articles in these literatures indicate a lack of communication between them. In this article, we assess the state of integration between the entirety of the sport psychology and management literatures on teams by considering the full set of interconnected team articles in the SCOPUS database (6974 articles over 69 years). We use this data to conduct a combination of citation network analysis and content analysis via topic modeling to evaluate conceptual integration. The data show that interdisciplinary discussion between these two fields is lacking, particularly regarding the integration of sport psychology into management research. Whereas 7% of references to team articles in sport psychology come from management journals, only 0.6% of team references in management journals come from sport psychology. Despite this, longitudinal analysis indicates that in the last 10 years the rate of integration between these fields is increasing. We identify specific topics that have accounted for this integration and suggest topics ripe for future integration.