Performance and decision making in rugby union: Influence of team-based goals and task complexity

Success in rugby union games requires players to dynamically adjust their actions to the game situations. However, action selection might be influenced by players' social environment. This study investigates how individual and team-based motivational goals and task complexity affect rugby players' decision-making behaviour in a representative small-sided game. We hypothesised that priming a team-based goal would benefit performance and that ball carrier's action would differ between individual and team-based goal conditions only in complex game situations.

A three against three rugby situation was designed with two levels of task complexity manipulated by setting two defensive conditions. The motivational goals (either individual or team-based) were primed by a cover story. Participants were 102 rugby players from elite training centres. Their performance during the games were analysed from video annotations of their actions and from their position on the pitch obtained with wearable GPS sensor data.

Contrarily to previous findings, performance was better when priming an individual goal. Players' decision was significantly influenced by the goal orientation. More precisely, when priming an individual goal, rugby players appear to be more responsive to available spaces for themselves, as suggested by the higher proportion of runs observed, and less responsive to available spaces for their teammates (and conversely when priming a team-based goal), especially in complex situations.