Abstract:

Background:
Quality and effectiveness of sporting activity are directly related to team atmosphere and communication between team members during training and competitions. Conflicts in sport teams often result from players' bad communicative skills.

Aim:
The aim of our research was to assess emotional barriers and atmosphere in South Ural State University (SUSU) teams.

Methods:
The study was conducted from September till December 2016 on SUSU men's and women's volleyball teams – 30 participants in total, aged 18-23. Emotional barriers survey offered by Boiko was used to assess five aspects of emotional sphere: inability to control emotions; inadequate emotional expression; emotional rigidity; prevalence of negative emotions; and unwillingness to develop close emotional relationships with other people. To overcome emotional barriers, during three months athletes attended experimental communication training (10-15 minutes three times a week) immediately before sport training sessions

Results:
Our findings showed that only 13.3% of examined boys and girls had a low level of emotional barriers while approximately a half of participants suffered from high emotional barriers. After the experiment, the levels of barriers significantly decreased, which had a beneficial effect on sports performance.

Conclusions:
Ten-fifteen-minute training games and exercises aimed to remove emotional barriers in communication have a positive impact on players, reduce "obstacles" in emotional contacts, improve general emotional atmosphere, and increase collective team performance.

Keywords:

Interpersonal communication, emotional barriers, students' picked teams.