News Detail

At her former University (Technical University of Munich) Zsuzsanna Zimanyi was involved in a research project that investigated causes of collective sports team collapse. Within this project at the Chair of Sportpsychology the first article with the title "When A Team Suddenly Falls Apart - Causes of Collective Sport Team Collapse" by Wergin, V., Zimanyi, Z., Mesagno, C., & Beckmann, J. was published in Frontiers in Psychology.

The study explores the antecedents of collective collapse of sport teams in high pressure situations. The goals of this study were to define team collapse in contrast to negative momentum and also to explore perceived causes of collective team collapse in various sports teams with more than 2 team members. Semi-structured interviews showed that collective team collapse appeared to be induced by a temporal cascade of causes. This cascade included antecedents, critical events as well as affective, cognitive and behavioural outcomes.