Teams lacking aggressiveness will underperform by a wide margin in any competitive sport. Since aggressiveness and competitiveness are basically the same motive, a team lacking in aggression is a team lacking in competitive spirit. Our experience using the Reiss Sports Motivation Profile, which is a standardized tool of what motivates an athlete, is that aggressiveness and competitiveness are essential for athletic excellence in a competitive sport.
In some sports requiring close cooperation with others, such as synchronized swimming, competitiveness may hinder performance. In most sports, however, aggressiveness is a plus for success.
Aggression can be a factor in penalities because it motivates players to hit others. I recall, for example, a football play in which a defensive back leveled a receiver seconds after the football flew over the receiver's head and the whole crowd was watching. Coaches are advised to remove players who are highly aggressive during critical moments when a penalty might spell defeat. If the player is essential, coaches should have another player go over to the aggressive player immediately after the play is over to prevent penalities by keeping the aggressive player away from others.
Aggressiveness is so obviously relevant to athletic success one wonders how anybody could argue otherwise. In a previous blog I discussed the phenomenon of "self hugging," which is the natural assumption that one's values are rooted in human nature, when in reality they are rooted in individual nature. A cooperative, conflict avoidant person, for example, is naturally motivated to assume that "something must be wrong" with aggressive, competitive people. In the eyes of a cooperative person -- a person who experiences conflict as unpleasant -- the aggressive person has chosen displeasure over happiness. Thus the cooperative person thinks people are better off being cooperative. The cooperative person does not understand that the aggressive person enjoys competition. Similiarly, self-hugging aggressive people think cooperative people lack guts and disrespect their backing down to avoid conflict.
In social psychology research, self hugging is expressed as a double standard favoring liberal (left wing) values over opposites. That is why research lacking construct validity, reliability, and validity, can be published in social psychology as "scientifically valid" if it supports the "correct" (usually liberal, left wing) values. A good case in point is intrinsic/extrinsic motivation, which is based on the invalid idea that human motives divide into just two kinds. The underlying research never would have been published in social psychology journals if it supported the values of materialism over natural curiosity.
These comments are based on a validated taxonomy of 16 human needs, called the multifaceted model of intrinsic motivation. As applied to sports, this model has produced an Olympic gold medalist in weightlifting, a world champion handball team, and successful major league professional soccer teams. My blog has posts describing the sports model and the motivation theory.
