Be a Leader Or Die: A research on leadership perceptions of e-sport players

Leadership is a phenomenon as old as human history. However, it is always transformed in accordance with the needs of the age. Accordingly, leadership is a subject that should also be examined in the field of e-sports, which is the popular sports branch of contemporary age. In this context, the aim of the research is to reveal the components of leadership in e-sports and to test the interaction of these components with the concepts of leader-member exchange, organizational loyalty and task performance. The population of the research consists of professional e-sports players playing in Turkish teams. A pilot study was conducted to identify the components that constitute leadership in e-sports. In the pilot study, qualitative methods and content analysis were used to obtain codes and themes related to the perception of leadership in e-sports. During the quantitative phase of the pilot study, the item pool for the scale, which was created based on these codes and themes, underwent exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. This process led to the development of the E-sports Leadership Perception Scale. In the main study phase, the validity of the research model predicted was tested by structural equation modeling. These tests were carried out through confirmatory factor analysis, path analysis, and bootstrap methods. As a result of the analysis, it was found that the effect values of the predicted model were significant. In conclusion; It has been determined that the components of leadership perception in e-sports, leader-member exchange, organizational loyalty and task performance affect each other significantly and the model is valid.