Team leadership in leisure sports groups: From followership to co-leadership

This study examines leadership emergence in self-managed leisure sports groups, revealing how micro-cultural practices facilitate follower-to-leader transitions in truly flat, voluntary contexts. Drawing on qualitative data from four French groups, we demonstrate that conviviality functions as a dual mechanism: enabling emergence through convivial rituals whilst exercising concertive control via relational exclusion. We extend Badura et al.’s distal-proximal framework (2022) by operationalising micro-cultural mediation as a critical filter shaping who emerges, and advance leadership-in-interaction scholarship by revealing how direction, alignment, and commitment are accomplished through mundane practices rather than formal authority. Our findings identify three hybrid leadership configurations (coordinated sharing, follower-initiated co-leadership, substitutive leadership), four follower pathways, and a distinctive ‘ripple effect’ wherein accumulated helping prompts gradual identity transitions. This reconceptualises leadership as collectively accomplished through culturally embedded practices, advancing post-heroic, relational understandings of influence in low-stakes settings where formal authority is minimal and influence purely relational.