For many years, work organisations have used systematic selection procedures to help select candidates with the right skills and competences for a job, to help identify if a candidate fits with the organisational culture and to predict candidate’s future performance. Similarly to the business environment, one of the key areas in sport is the selection of suitable candidates. However, systematic selection procedures are not often used in the sport environment. Unsystematic and unstructured selection generally prevails in volleyball as well. The selection of players for a team is usually done by coaches, who select athletes on the basis of their intuition, knowledge and experience, rather than on the basis of objective criteria. The criteria on which coaches often select players are body height, jump height and playing performance. Therefore, in my master thesis I wanted to investigate which psychological characteristics and abilities contribute to a higher performance of volleyball players. With the results, I wanted to identify which characteristics should be included in the selection process of new volleyball players. The study, in which I examined the relationship between some psychological constructs and the playing performance of volleyball players, involved 50 male and female volleyball players from the first Slovenian volleyball league. The only statistically significant predictor of volleyball players' performance in the regression analysis was general mental ability, while competitiveness and control and rigidity as dimensions of resilience also had a significant correlation with performance. The other constructs studied (personality traits, concentration, motivation, self-confidence and spatial ability) did not significantly correlate with volleyball players' performance. Although more research would be needed to design an appropriate selection procedure, it would nevertheless be worthwhile to start to address the area of systematic selection in volleyball, as an appropriate selection procedure can bring many benefits to a team. It also raises the question if introducing a selection procedure in Slovenia is reasonable, as Slovenian clubs do not have a large pool of tall volleyball players with good motor and technical skills.
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