Assessing the Cohesion of Teams: Validity of the Group Environment Questionnaire

Abstract

The process of validating a recently developed instrument to assess perceived team cohesion is discussed. The Group Environment Questionnaire (GEQ), an instrument designed to measure cohesion in sport teams, has good estimates for its internal consistency and for its content and factorial validity (Carron, Widmeyer, & Brawley, 1985; Widmeyer, Brawley, & Carron, 1985). However, other aspects of its validity required examination. The present article reports three studies concerning inspection of the GEQ's concurrent (Study 1), predictive (Study 2), and construct (Study 3) validities. In Study 1 the GEQ exhibited the predicted correspondence with similar measures of cohesion and was not significantly correlated with measures of other constructs. In Study 2 the GEQ successfully discriminated team and individual sport athletes by predicting their membership to these groups on the basis of their task cohesion scores. As well, classification of athletes as new and long-standing members of individual sport teams ...