Team Flow: The Missing Piece in Performance

Background: The concept of individual flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975) is experienced as total absorption in a task, when challenge and skill are in balance and both are high. It leads to enjoyment, intrinsic motivation, and often to enhanced performance, making flow an experience that athletes and coaches aim to recapture. Psychologists have proposed that flow can be experienced at a team level (Quinn, 2003), but researchers used individual flow scales to measure team flow.

Methods and Results: We conducted interviews with team sport athletes and coaches to examine the conceptualization of team flow (Mosek et al., 2012). We found seven themes that mirrored individual flow scales, but also another seven themes that were unique to team flow. Based on the qualitative statements we created a measure, the Team Flow State Inventory (TFSI), with four items on each of the 14 subscales (themes). Five sport psychology experts on flow provided face and content validity for the TFSI. In this study, 342 team sport athletes of both genders, aged 18 to 40 years, from Israel and Australia, completed the TFSI. We conducted confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to examine the fit of data to the 14-subscale model. The resulting CFA showed a sound fit to the 14-subscale model (Chi-squared ratio = 2.40, TLI = .886, CFI = .904, RMSEA = .064).

Conclusion: We concluded that this refinement process produced a version of the TFSI that is suitable to be examined further as a measure of team flow in sport.