Abstract
Paternalistic leadership is a particular leadership style can easy be found in Chinese context and has been paid attentions by researchers in many fields in recent years. The purpose of this study was to review the 27 published journal papers of paternalistic leadership in sports teams. This study was expected to explore the status quo of paternalistic leadership research in the field of physical education, and expected to give suggestions for future studies form the reviewing. This study found that most of the studies were examined the direct effects of paternalistic leadership on athletes' effectiveness (i. e., emotion, fatigue, motivation, and satisfactions). Athletes perceived paternalistic leadership from high to low in ordinal were moral, benevolence, and authoritarianism for the three dimensions of paternalistic leadership. The correlations between benevolence and authoritarianism were low positive, between moral and authoritarianism was low positive or negative, and between benevolence and authoritarianism was high positive. The direct effects of paternalistic leadership on outcome variables were positive or negative were dependent on the variables. This study criticized these studies, and gave eight suggestions for future studies.