Introduction. Achieving high performance in sport is important for various actors – sportsmen, coaches, sports club, city, country. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the factors influencing sportsman’s success. The purpose of the study is exploring the sportsman’s leadership potential as a variable influencing the sportive performance and the athlete’s position in the system of socio-group relations. Materials and methods. The empirical study involved sportsmen of Moscow and Moscow region of both sexes, aged 15 to 21, in the following individual sports: track and field athletics, gymnastics and tennis (N=168). The following methodologies were used: Diagnostics of leadership ability (E. Zharikov, E. Krushelnitsky); Goal achievement motivation test (T. Ehlers); Volitional qualities self-rating by university athletes (N.E. Stambulova); elements of T. Leary’s Diagnostic technique for interpersonal relationships; methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis, descriptive statistics methods, Pearson’s correlation coefficient. Results. The research showed that the group with low performance in sports activities included people prone to dictate (10%), while there are none of them in the group with high performance. Moreover, the low sportive performance group had power dictators (7%), while the high performance group had none of them. This may prevent a sportsman from adequately perceiving the coach’s comments and improving his/her skills. It was revealed that athletes with moderately pronounced leadership qualities prevail in the high performance group. It is shown that all of the three groups showed a moderately high level of motivation for success for the most part. However 4% of the respondents in the group with high sporting performance showed a high level of motivation for success, and 14% showed the same in the group with low performance. This confirms that too high motivation for success does not lead necessarily to sportsman’s high performance. It was revealed that the high-performance sportsmen group demonstrated pronouncedly such qualities as determination, courage and firmness. Direct positive connection between leadership ability and purposefulness, self-control and self-restraint was revealed on the basis of the correlation analysis. Conclusions. It was empirically found that the development of athlete’s leadership potential requires working on improvement of one’s personal qualities and motivational sphere, namely developing motivation to success and such volitional qualities as determination, self-control and endurance.