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Organizational Behavior in Sport Management fills a gap in sport management literature by exploring the key organizational behavior topics in sport organization settings.
The text covers issues such as diversity, ethics, values, behavior, leadership, and much more.
Book Features
Organizational Behavior in Sport Management offers the following features:
• Learning objectives and discussion questions for each chapter that help students conceptualize, retain, and understand the content
• Case studies with discussion questions to help students apply the concepts from each chapter
• In the Boardroom sidebars that use real-life examples from organizations within the field to highlight key topics
The In the Boardroom sidebars reflect best practices for various levels of numerous sport organizations, affording readers a great range of applications in the sport management world.
Instructor Guide
In addition, the text has an online instructor guide that includes chapter objectives, discussion questions from the text (and their answers), discussion questions for case studies (and their answers), suggestions for integrating the case studies into lectures, links to recommended websites, assignments, class projects, essay ideas, and lists of suggested readings.
Focus of Book
Organizational Behavior in Sport Management presents classical research in organizational behavior as well as up-to-date knowledge from the field of sport management. The authors offer information on individual, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and organizational processes that are fundamental to working within a sport organization, placing equal emphasis on what managers of sport organizations need to understand about human behavior and what each person brings to the work situation in terms of his or her own attitudes, thoughts, perceptions, and skills.
The authors emphasize empowering employees and understanding their needs and desires regarding work, as opposed to managing employees in one particular way. With this in mind, the authors discuss the roles of sport organization administrators and executives, volunteers, employees, and players and coaches of sport teams, exploring how they behave independently as well as how they interact with each other.
An Understanding of Organizational Behavior
Organizational Behavior in Sport Management offers a foundational and contemporary look at the inner workings of sport organizations, providing numerous real-life examples from throughout the country and grounding students in the key behavioral and managerial issues that leaders, managers, and employees in sport organizations face today. As such, this text answers the key questions of why we do what we do at work, why others behave as they do, and how our interpretation of events and behaviors is subject to our own biases. In the process, students will gain an understanding of the most important organizational behavior topics and get a glimpse of how they could successfully function in a sport organization.
Part I. Organizational Behavior in Sport Organizations
Chapter 1. Importance of Organizational Behavior in Sport
Importance of Understanding OB
Creating a People-Centered Strategy
Organizations as Open Systems
Acquiring Knowledge and Experience in Sport Management
Summary
Discussion Questions
Chapter 2. Understanding Diversity
Understanding Social Identity
Diversity Management and Inclusive Organizations
Outcomes Associated With Diversity Management
Challenges to Diversity in Sport Organizations
Does Diversity Training Work?
Summary
Discussion Questions
Chapter 3. Ethics in Sport Organizations
Ethics
Developing an Ethical Environment in Sport Organizations
Importance of Leadership in Developing an Ethical Environment
Codes of Ethics
Ethical Decision Making
Ethical Guidelines in Human Resource Management
Corporate Social Responsibility
Future Challenges in Ethical Operations of Sport Organizations
Summary
Discussion Questions
Part II. Managing the Individual
Chapter 4. Understanding Personality and Attitudes
Intelligence
Understanding Personality
Personality and Emotional Intelligence
Cognitive Concepts in Personality
Motivational Concepts in Personality
Interactional Approach
Attributions in Organizational Behavior
Attitude
Important Attitudes in Sport Organization Workplaces
Summary
Discussion Questions
Chapter 5. Learning, Motivation, Training, and Development
Learning in Sport Organizations
Motivation Through Goal Setting
Performance in Sport Organizations
Training and Development to Enhance Individual Performance
Summary
Discussion Questions
Chapter 6. Job Satisfaction and Design
Understanding Job Satisfaction and Job Dissatisfaction
Enhancing Job Satisfaction
Stakeholder Satisfaction in Sport
Summary
Discussion Questions
Chapter 7. Stress and Well-Being
Causes of Stress
Negative and Positive Types of Stress
Stress in the Competitive Sport Environment
Trauma and Stress in Sport
Dealing With Stress
Preventing Stress From Becoming Burnout
Summary
Discussion Questions
Chapter 8. Socialization and Integration
Process of Socialization
Easing New Members Into the Workforce
Socialization Contexts
Temporary Versus Enduring Organizations
Internationalization of Sport
Summary
Discussion Questions
Part III. Managing the Group
Chapter 9. Leadership and Development
History of Leadership Research
Leadership Research in Sport
Summary
Discussion Questions
Chapter 10. Decision Making
Programmed Versus Nonprogrammed Decisions
Rational Model of Decision Making
Administrative Model of Decision Making
Garbage Can Model of Decision Making
Individual Decision Making
Risk Taking in the Decision-Making Process
Decision-Making Challenges
Group Decision Making
Summary
Discussion Questions
Chapter 11. Effective Teamwork
Overview of Teams and Teamwork
Team Development
Team Roles
Team Effectiveness
Team Cohesion
Social Loafing
Common Team-Related Challenges
Summary
Discussion Questions
Chapter 12. Conflict, Negotiation, and Power
Conflict
Negotiation
Individual Types of Power
Summary
Discussion Questions
Part IV. Managing the Organization
Chapter 13. Communication in the Organization
Interpersonal Communication
Communicating Through Social Media
Common Communication Forms
Summary
Discussion Questions
Chapter 14. Organizational Culture
Where OC Research Began and Where It Is Today
Levels of Awareness
Espoused Versus Experienced OC
Integrating the Employee Into the Culture
OC Scholarship in Sport
Summary
Discussion Questions
Chapter 15. Organizational Change
Organizational Change in Sport
Lewin’s Models: Change Management and Force Field Analysis
Greiner’s Patterns of Organizational Change
Sport Management Research on Organizational Change
Summary
Discussion Questions
Eric MacIntosh, PhD, is an associate professor of sport management at the University of Ottawa in Canada. Dr. MacIntosh researches and teaches on various organizational behavior topics, covering concepts such as culture, leadership, satisfaction, and socialization. His principal research interests delve into the functioning of the organization and how a favorable culture can transmit positively internally and outwardly into the marketplace. Dr. MacIntosh has consulted for and conducted research with many prominent national and international sport organizations (e.g., Commonwealth Games Federation, NHL, Right to Play, U Sports, Youth Olympic Games). He is well published in leading peer-reviewed sport management journals and is a member of several prominent editorial boards. He is also the coeditor of International Sport Management.
Laura J. Burton, PhD, is an associate professor of sport management in the department of educational leadership within the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests include understanding leadership in organizations (particularly sport organizations) and exploring development, access, and success in leadership. Her work focuses on issues of gender in leadership contexts, specifically how stereotypes and discrimination affect women in sport leadership. She has served as the editor of the Journal of Intercollegiate Sport and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Sport Management. She has been published in the Journal of Sport Management, Sport Management Review, and Sex Roles. She is coeditor of Women in Sport Leadership: Research and Practice for Change, published in 2017, and the textbook Sport Leadership in the 21st Century, published in 2014.
Increased diversity brings change to sport organizations
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport.
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport. Depending on where you go, of course, the sport of choice may be hockey, basketball, cross-country skiing, or the world's most popular sport of soccer - but the general appeal of sport is experienced everywhere. Because sport is universal, participant and fan communities are bound to include diversity; therefore, organizations that want to support their participants and fans must reflect and engage those differences. One example can be found in ESPN, which recognizes the importance of diversity in fulfilling its mission: "To serve sports fans wherever sports are watched, listened to, discussed, debated, read about or played" (ESPN, "About," n.d., n.p.). To help it fulfill this mission, ESPN seeks to recruit, hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent the organization's globally diverse group of fans. To find out more about the importance of diversity in ESPN's employment practices, check out the organization's career website at https://jobs.espncareers.com.
As sport organizations continue to become more diverse, the ways in which they work also change. These changes relate to the shift to a more service-based economy in sport (Cunningham, 2015), which of course involves more direct interaction between employees and customers. Indeed, a service-based business succeeds only if it creates high-quality relationships between customers and employees. Researchers have noted that customers who believe they are interacting with people different from themselves experience less satisfaction in the interaction; therefore, building a workforce that reflects the different types of customers engaged by the organization may result in more positive customer service experiences (Cunningham, 2015).
In another ongoing change, both in the sport world and beyond, organizations increasingly use team-based approaches to tackle tasks and projects. In organizations that foster and support a diverse workforce, individuals who work in teams can interact with others who bring a wide variety of experiences, perspectives, and ideas. In this way, their differences can produce better work outcomes for the team and for the organization as a whole. Of course, as we discuss later in this chapter, working in a diverse group also comes with challenges. Therefore, the organization must provide support to help people overcome these challenges in order to make the most of diversity in a work team.
An additional consideration involves the increase in mergers and acquisitions in the sport industry, which sometimes involve global companies and can result in employees working with and for individuals from diverse backgrounds. In 2005, for instance, two of the largest sports apparel organizations merged when Adidas bought Reebok. Though both were international companies, Reebok was headquartered in the United States, whereas Adidas was based in Germany. Thus one of the initial challenges presented by the merger involved how to align the German organizational culture of engineering and design with the more marketing-focused organizational culture of a U.S. company. As this example suggests, the organizations that best support and foster an inclusive work environment enjoy an advantage in responding effectively to mergers and acquisitions. Furthermore, at the local level (e.g., towns, cities, regions), merging sport organizations may provide new and different perspectives on managing those organizations and better serve the needs of diverse customers (Cunningham, 2015).
Diversity in sport organizations can also be affected by legal mandates. In the United States, for instance, civil rights legislation mandates protection against discrimination based on race, gender, age, sex, physical ability, or religion; in addition, some state laws go further by protecting individuals from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The first major U.S. legislation of this type to address the workplace was Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. Later, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 added provisions allowing individuals to recover compensatory and punitive damages for intentional violations of Title VII by an employer (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2009). In another example, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 affords protection for underrepresented groups (e.g., women in sport organizations) and has been used to protect individuals in cases of discrimination, notably sexual harassment. In Canada, the Canadian Human Rights act extends legal protection for individuals regardless of "race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability, or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered" (Canadian Human Rights Act, 2017, n.p.).
Legal mandates notwithstanding, sport organizations that lack a diverse workforce often face ethical challenges, most notably at the senior level (i.e., in the leadership team). One high-profile example can be found in the NFL's struggle to formulate even a barely adequate response to the issue of domestic violence committed by players. In response, calls continue to be made for the league to increase the diversity of its senior leadership - specifically, by including more women - to help it respond more effectively to this issue (Brinson, 2014).
More generally, social pressures have contributed to increased awareness of the need for a diverse workforce in sport organizations (Cunningham, 2015). In this vein, scholar and advocate Richard Lapchick (2016) and his colleagues collect extensive data regarding the racial and gender demographics of employees working in U.S.-based intercollegiate sport organizations and in major professional sport organizations in the United States and beyond. Lapchick and other sport management scholars - including Fink (2016), LaVoi (2016), Burton (2015), Cunningham (2015), and Walker and Melton (2015) - continue to call for an increase in diverse representation in senior leadership positions across sport organizations. The importance of diversity has also been voiced by external stakeholders, such as customers and prospective employees. For example, prospective employees have expressed more positive attitudes toward sport organizations that they believed were more diverse and maintained a more inclusive organizational culture (W. Lee & Cunningham, 2015).
In the Boardroom
Diversity, Inclusion, and Wellness at ESPN
The ESPN Diversity, Inclusion & Wellness team "strives to hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent . . . [the organization's] diverse global fans" (ESPN, "Diversity," n.d., n.p.). ESPN maintains several employee resource groups (ERGs) that are each led by employees and assigned a member of the executive team who serves as a champion for the group. Including more than 2,000 members overall, the ERGs provide a way for employees to connect based on shared interests or backgrounds. Examples include Young Professionals, Women, Asians, People With Disabilities, Latinos, Families, African Americans, and ESPN EQUAL (for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees). The collective mission of the ERGs is to do the following (ESPN, "Diversity"):
- Educate and promote cultural diversity
- Network and learn from others
- Develop professional skill sets
- Add value to the business
- Expand the recruitment base
- Support ESPN's community and diversity outreach partnerships
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Importance of organizational behavior in sport
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders.
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders. In every sector of the sport industry - from grassroots club sport to the high-performance sector - the people who run and contribute to sport organizations are crucial to each organization's daily challenges, trials and tribulations, and, ultimately, success or failure.
The field of organizational behavior (OB) involves the scientific study of individual behavior, group dynamics, and structural choices in organizations (Nelson, Quick, Armstrong, & Condie, 2015). Put simply, OB researchers study people, what they think of and do in their jobs and in their groups, and, more generally, how an organization operates and performs. Such researchers find a wide array of opportunities to examine organizational behavior in the sport industry. For instance, employed work may be performed on either a part-time or a full-time basis in either the amateur or the professional sport industry.
Furthermore, both part-time and full-time work can be done in either an enduring or a temporary organization. Enduring organizations (e.g., the National Hockey League's Montreal Canadiens) have a long and storied history, whereas temporary organizations (e.g., an organizing committee for a sport event - for instance, the 2018 Commonwealth Games) exist for a defined and relatively short period of time. Temporary sport organizations typically rely more heavily on volunteers, particularly at higher levels of performance (e.g., the Olympics) and in the amateur sector both nationally and locally (e.g., Canada Games, club-based sport competitions). Of course, volunteers are also invaluable to enduring organizations, where they support various initiatives, such as community fundraising campaigns. At the amateur level, however, many organizations lack the budget to hire paid staff and therefore rely largely on unpaid volunteers for their success and even for their survival.
The work performed in the sport industry engages many stakeholders, who are also part of what makes sport operations both attractive and specialized. Full-time employees, sport volunteers, athletes, coaches, trainers, administrative support staffers - all of these people have various levels of attachment to their work and to their sport organizations. For instance, the factors that motivate full-time employees to excel at their jobs and advance in their companies are likely to differ from the factors that motivate individuals to volunteer their time without any particular expected return on investment. Differences also exist in their attitudes toward work and their behavior in group and organizational settings. Sport organizations are also distinguished by the variety of actors who may hold relevant technical expertise - sometimes with very different skill sets - such as coaches, players, and administrators.
As sport management began to emerge as a field of study in classrooms across the United States and Canada in the 1980s, scholars borrowed from parent disciplines - such as sport psychology, sociology, and business administration - in order to learn more about the factors that make working in and for sport organizations unique (e.g., transformational leadership in sport administration or coaching, marketing segmentation for sport organizations, the marketing of and through sport). Sport management scholars also began organizing conferences, both in North America (e.g., North American Society for Sport Management, n.d.) and abroad in order to discuss the field and its future. In these formative years of sport management scholarship, the study of people's organizational behavior often concentrated on coaches and administrators. As the field matured, research also addressed other stakeholder issues (e.g., volunteers, gender, ethics, race), marketing literature was further developed, and the study of human resource management in sport organizations emerged.
Thus the study of people in sport organizations was garnering more interest. This growth resulted in part from the increased understanding of the importance of knowledge acquisition relative to the field of sport management and the realization that human capital is one of the most important resources in an organization, regardless of sector. This resource-based view, or RBV (see Barney, 1991), posited that firms are more likely to enjoy sustained advantages if they control resources that are not substitutable and are valuable, rare, and imperfectly imitable. The RBV approach has helped sport management researchers determine the ways in which sport is unique and the ways in which it is similar to other industries.
Acquiring and developing both tangible and intangible resources is crucial to the successful management of an organization. This process requires us to appreciate both the external environment and the internal context of the organization. External forces acting on the organization include economic, political, sociocultural, legal, ecological, demographic, and technological factors. In this competitive global ecosystem, "knowledge and human capital have become essential strategic resources . . . , [and] the process of fostering their creation and deployment has emerged as one of the most important areas of strategic management" (Szymanksi & Wolfe, 2017, p. 26). In these days of fierce competition and rapid change, it is critical that management scholars recognize and understand that attracting, developing, and retaining human talent is a prerequisite for success.
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Future challenges in ethical operations of sport organizations
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead.
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead. Therefore, we encourage you to contemplate other ongoing ethical challenges, as well as those that may yet arise.
Intercollegiate sport will continue to face ethical challenges in both decision making and leadership due to ongoing pressure to win and increase revenue. Specifically, universities continue to rely on athletics as a marketing tool to increase student applications, increase enrollment of out-of-state students, enhance reputation, and, for a small percentage of universities, bring in considerable revenue. As a result, the pressure to win will continue to be felt by athletic directors, administrators, and coaches. At the same time, these individuals also face other pressures, such as fielding the most talented team possible within the academic requirements of the university and ensuring that student-athletes maintain their academic eligibility according to NCAA requirements. These competing pressures can lead to unethical decisions that carry negative implications for all of a university's stakeholders. To see how the desire to win can take precedence over all else, we need only to review the scandal related to alleged sexual assaults, other crimes, and cover-ups by members of the Baylor University football program under the leadership of then-coach Art Briles (Goodwyn, 2017).
On the professional level, both sport leaders and other stakeholders will continue to face the ethical challenge of how to address the growing crisis of traumatic brain injury in contact sports. The NFL and the NHL need to provide honest and ethical leadership that can serve as an example for those in youth sport and interscholastic and intercollegiate sport. Unfortunately, as of yet, league leaders have chosen to resist honest, significant reforms that would help support retired players who suffer from debilitating injuries as a result of head trauma sustained during their playing days (Lupica, 2016; Branch, 2016).
In addition, ethical challenges will continue to be created by technological developments that enable fast and easy sharing of information. Social media platforms (e.g., Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) can closely link fans with players and employees of sport organizations in exciting ways. Yet for all the positive connections they enable, we have also witnessed the ugliness that can occur when individuals hide behind a screen name. This ugliness was brought to the fore in the summer of 2016 by two prominent sports reporters, Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro. In a video that quickly went viral, men read tweets posted about Spain and DiCaro that highlighted the harassment and abuse they have experienced on Twitter. (To view the video, search YouTube for "#MoreThanMean." Warning: The content is disturbing.)Another troubling trend involves the use of social media to attack athletes (usually football players) when they are perceived to be responsible for a team's loss. Athletic departments, and coaches in particular, have been quick to respond to such attacks, but more work needs to be done on the issue - perhaps, for example, establishing a social media code of ethics for fans to follow.
In the Boardroom
The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics
Intercollegiate athletic programs - particularly Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) programs - face significant challenges, including the rising cost of maintaining competitive teams, pressure from stakeholders to win and keep winning, and the need to generate revenue to support their programs. These challenges can lead to ethical issues, including cheating (e.g., fake classes, improper tutoring assistance) geared to keeping athletes academically eligible. In this environment, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics seeks to influence policies to better support the academic experiences of student-athletes. The commission has produced reports and built an interactive database that stakeholders in college athletics can use to understand the current state of college sport and the spending it entails (Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, 2017). As a future employee in a sport organization, you can use resources provided by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and other groups (such as the College Sport Research Institute in Columbia, South Carolina) to stay informed about issues facing collegiate athletic administrators.
Case Study
Ethical Challenges in Youth Sport Administration
As fall arrives, you are excited to begin your first season as director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League. Though you look forward to watching the 30 teams play, you also recognize that some coaches and parents have exhibited conduct that does not support the principles of youth sport development, such as fun, fair play, and good sportspersonship. Unfortunately, it is not long into the season before you are approached by a group of disgruntled parents. They allege that the top team in the sixth-grade league (the Smithton Firecrackers) is violating the age requirement established by the league by allowing five players to play on their team who appear to be older and more mature than others in the league. The parents also complain that the coach of the Firecrackers (Coach Sarah) tends to use those five players for the majority of each game and that the scores are therefore lopsided. For example, one parent refers to a game in which her daughter's team lost 11-0 to the "more mature" Firecrackers. The parents also complain that Coach Sarah yells harshly at her players, even though you have received no complaints from parents of players on her team.
Case Study Questions
- Identify the ethical dilemmas presented in this fictional case study.
- Evaluate one of these dilemmas by using the etho-conventional decision-making model for sport managers.
- As director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League, what actions could you take to address the ethical dilemmas identified in question 1?
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Increased diversity brings change to sport organizations
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport.
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport. Depending on where you go, of course, the sport of choice may be hockey, basketball, cross-country skiing, or the world's most popular sport of soccer - but the general appeal of sport is experienced everywhere. Because sport is universal, participant and fan communities are bound to include diversity; therefore, organizations that want to support their participants and fans must reflect and engage those differences. One example can be found in ESPN, which recognizes the importance of diversity in fulfilling its mission: "To serve sports fans wherever sports are watched, listened to, discussed, debated, read about or played" (ESPN, "About," n.d., n.p.). To help it fulfill this mission, ESPN seeks to recruit, hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent the organization's globally diverse group of fans. To find out more about the importance of diversity in ESPN's employment practices, check out the organization's career website at https://jobs.espncareers.com.
As sport organizations continue to become more diverse, the ways in which they work also change. These changes relate to the shift to a more service-based economy in sport (Cunningham, 2015), which of course involves more direct interaction between employees and customers. Indeed, a service-based business succeeds only if it creates high-quality relationships between customers and employees. Researchers have noted that customers who believe they are interacting with people different from themselves experience less satisfaction in the interaction; therefore, building a workforce that reflects the different types of customers engaged by the organization may result in more positive customer service experiences (Cunningham, 2015).
In another ongoing change, both in the sport world and beyond, organizations increasingly use team-based approaches to tackle tasks and projects. In organizations that foster and support a diverse workforce, individuals who work in teams can interact with others who bring a wide variety of experiences, perspectives, and ideas. In this way, their differences can produce better work outcomes for the team and for the organization as a whole. Of course, as we discuss later in this chapter, working in a diverse group also comes with challenges. Therefore, the organization must provide support to help people overcome these challenges in order to make the most of diversity in a work team.
An additional consideration involves the increase in mergers and acquisitions in the sport industry, which sometimes involve global companies and can result in employees working with and for individuals from diverse backgrounds. In 2005, for instance, two of the largest sports apparel organizations merged when Adidas bought Reebok. Though both were international companies, Reebok was headquartered in the United States, whereas Adidas was based in Germany. Thus one of the initial challenges presented by the merger involved how to align the German organizational culture of engineering and design with the more marketing-focused organizational culture of a U.S. company. As this example suggests, the organizations that best support and foster an inclusive work environment enjoy an advantage in responding effectively to mergers and acquisitions. Furthermore, at the local level (e.g., towns, cities, regions), merging sport organizations may provide new and different perspectives on managing those organizations and better serve the needs of diverse customers (Cunningham, 2015).
Diversity in sport organizations can also be affected by legal mandates. In the United States, for instance, civil rights legislation mandates protection against discrimination based on race, gender, age, sex, physical ability, or religion; in addition, some state laws go further by protecting individuals from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The first major U.S. legislation of this type to address the workplace was Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. Later, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 added provisions allowing individuals to recover compensatory and punitive damages for intentional violations of Title VII by an employer (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2009). In another example, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 affords protection for underrepresented groups (e.g., women in sport organizations) and has been used to protect individuals in cases of discrimination, notably sexual harassment. In Canada, the Canadian Human Rights act extends legal protection for individuals regardless of "race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability, or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered" (Canadian Human Rights Act, 2017, n.p.).
Legal mandates notwithstanding, sport organizations that lack a diverse workforce often face ethical challenges, most notably at the senior level (i.e., in the leadership team). One high-profile example can be found in the NFL's struggle to formulate even a barely adequate response to the issue of domestic violence committed by players. In response, calls continue to be made for the league to increase the diversity of its senior leadership - specifically, by including more women - to help it respond more effectively to this issue (Brinson, 2014).
More generally, social pressures have contributed to increased awareness of the need for a diverse workforce in sport organizations (Cunningham, 2015). In this vein, scholar and advocate Richard Lapchick (2016) and his colleagues collect extensive data regarding the racial and gender demographics of employees working in U.S.-based intercollegiate sport organizations and in major professional sport organizations in the United States and beyond. Lapchick and other sport management scholars - including Fink (2016), LaVoi (2016), Burton (2015), Cunningham (2015), and Walker and Melton (2015) - continue to call for an increase in diverse representation in senior leadership positions across sport organizations. The importance of diversity has also been voiced by external stakeholders, such as customers and prospective employees. For example, prospective employees have expressed more positive attitudes toward sport organizations that they believed were more diverse and maintained a more inclusive organizational culture (W. Lee & Cunningham, 2015).
In the Boardroom
Diversity, Inclusion, and Wellness at ESPN
The ESPN Diversity, Inclusion & Wellness team "strives to hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent . . . [the organization's] diverse global fans" (ESPN, "Diversity," n.d., n.p.). ESPN maintains several employee resource groups (ERGs) that are each led by employees and assigned a member of the executive team who serves as a champion for the group. Including more than 2,000 members overall, the ERGs provide a way for employees to connect based on shared interests or backgrounds. Examples include Young Professionals, Women, Asians, People With Disabilities, Latinos, Families, African Americans, and ESPN EQUAL (for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees). The collective mission of the ERGs is to do the following (ESPN, "Diversity"):
- Educate and promote cultural diversity
- Network and learn from others
- Develop professional skill sets
- Add value to the business
- Expand the recruitment base
- Support ESPN's community and diversity outreach partnerships
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Importance of organizational behavior in sport
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders.
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders. In every sector of the sport industry - from grassroots club sport to the high-performance sector - the people who run and contribute to sport organizations are crucial to each organization's daily challenges, trials and tribulations, and, ultimately, success or failure.
The field of organizational behavior (OB) involves the scientific study of individual behavior, group dynamics, and structural choices in organizations (Nelson, Quick, Armstrong, & Condie, 2015). Put simply, OB researchers study people, what they think of and do in their jobs and in their groups, and, more generally, how an organization operates and performs. Such researchers find a wide array of opportunities to examine organizational behavior in the sport industry. For instance, employed work may be performed on either a part-time or a full-time basis in either the amateur or the professional sport industry.
Furthermore, both part-time and full-time work can be done in either an enduring or a temporary organization. Enduring organizations (e.g., the National Hockey League's Montreal Canadiens) have a long and storied history, whereas temporary organizations (e.g., an organizing committee for a sport event - for instance, the 2018 Commonwealth Games) exist for a defined and relatively short period of time. Temporary sport organizations typically rely more heavily on volunteers, particularly at higher levels of performance (e.g., the Olympics) and in the amateur sector both nationally and locally (e.g., Canada Games, club-based sport competitions). Of course, volunteers are also invaluable to enduring organizations, where they support various initiatives, such as community fundraising campaigns. At the amateur level, however, many organizations lack the budget to hire paid staff and therefore rely largely on unpaid volunteers for their success and even for their survival.
The work performed in the sport industry engages many stakeholders, who are also part of what makes sport operations both attractive and specialized. Full-time employees, sport volunteers, athletes, coaches, trainers, administrative support staffers - all of these people have various levels of attachment to their work and to their sport organizations. For instance, the factors that motivate full-time employees to excel at their jobs and advance in their companies are likely to differ from the factors that motivate individuals to volunteer their time without any particular expected return on investment. Differences also exist in their attitudes toward work and their behavior in group and organizational settings. Sport organizations are also distinguished by the variety of actors who may hold relevant technical expertise - sometimes with very different skill sets - such as coaches, players, and administrators.
As sport management began to emerge as a field of study in classrooms across the United States and Canada in the 1980s, scholars borrowed from parent disciplines - such as sport psychology, sociology, and business administration - in order to learn more about the factors that make working in and for sport organizations unique (e.g., transformational leadership in sport administration or coaching, marketing segmentation for sport organizations, the marketing of and through sport). Sport management scholars also began organizing conferences, both in North America (e.g., North American Society for Sport Management, n.d.) and abroad in order to discuss the field and its future. In these formative years of sport management scholarship, the study of people's organizational behavior often concentrated on coaches and administrators. As the field matured, research also addressed other stakeholder issues (e.g., volunteers, gender, ethics, race), marketing literature was further developed, and the study of human resource management in sport organizations emerged.
Thus the study of people in sport organizations was garnering more interest. This growth resulted in part from the increased understanding of the importance of knowledge acquisition relative to the field of sport management and the realization that human capital is one of the most important resources in an organization, regardless of sector. This resource-based view, or RBV (see Barney, 1991), posited that firms are more likely to enjoy sustained advantages if they control resources that are not substitutable and are valuable, rare, and imperfectly imitable. The RBV approach has helped sport management researchers determine the ways in which sport is unique and the ways in which it is similar to other industries.
Acquiring and developing both tangible and intangible resources is crucial to the successful management of an organization. This process requires us to appreciate both the external environment and the internal context of the organization. External forces acting on the organization include economic, political, sociocultural, legal, ecological, demographic, and technological factors. In this competitive global ecosystem, "knowledge and human capital have become essential strategic resources . . . , [and] the process of fostering their creation and deployment has emerged as one of the most important areas of strategic management" (Szymanksi & Wolfe, 2017, p. 26). In these days of fierce competition and rapid change, it is critical that management scholars recognize and understand that attracting, developing, and retaining human talent is a prerequisite for success.
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Future challenges in ethical operations of sport organizations
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead.
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead. Therefore, we encourage you to contemplate other ongoing ethical challenges, as well as those that may yet arise.
Intercollegiate sport will continue to face ethical challenges in both decision making and leadership due to ongoing pressure to win and increase revenue. Specifically, universities continue to rely on athletics as a marketing tool to increase student applications, increase enrollment of out-of-state students, enhance reputation, and, for a small percentage of universities, bring in considerable revenue. As a result, the pressure to win will continue to be felt by athletic directors, administrators, and coaches. At the same time, these individuals also face other pressures, such as fielding the most talented team possible within the academic requirements of the university and ensuring that student-athletes maintain their academic eligibility according to NCAA requirements. These competing pressures can lead to unethical decisions that carry negative implications for all of a university's stakeholders. To see how the desire to win can take precedence over all else, we need only to review the scandal related to alleged sexual assaults, other crimes, and cover-ups by members of the Baylor University football program under the leadership of then-coach Art Briles (Goodwyn, 2017).
On the professional level, both sport leaders and other stakeholders will continue to face the ethical challenge of how to address the growing crisis of traumatic brain injury in contact sports. The NFL and the NHL need to provide honest and ethical leadership that can serve as an example for those in youth sport and interscholastic and intercollegiate sport. Unfortunately, as of yet, league leaders have chosen to resist honest, significant reforms that would help support retired players who suffer from debilitating injuries as a result of head trauma sustained during their playing days (Lupica, 2016; Branch, 2016).
In addition, ethical challenges will continue to be created by technological developments that enable fast and easy sharing of information. Social media platforms (e.g., Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) can closely link fans with players and employees of sport organizations in exciting ways. Yet for all the positive connections they enable, we have also witnessed the ugliness that can occur when individuals hide behind a screen name. This ugliness was brought to the fore in the summer of 2016 by two prominent sports reporters, Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro. In a video that quickly went viral, men read tweets posted about Spain and DiCaro that highlighted the harassment and abuse they have experienced on Twitter. (To view the video, search YouTube for "#MoreThanMean." Warning: The content is disturbing.)Another troubling trend involves the use of social media to attack athletes (usually football players) when they are perceived to be responsible for a team's loss. Athletic departments, and coaches in particular, have been quick to respond to such attacks, but more work needs to be done on the issue - perhaps, for example, establishing a social media code of ethics for fans to follow.
In the Boardroom
The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics
Intercollegiate athletic programs - particularly Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) programs - face significant challenges, including the rising cost of maintaining competitive teams, pressure from stakeholders to win and keep winning, and the need to generate revenue to support their programs. These challenges can lead to ethical issues, including cheating (e.g., fake classes, improper tutoring assistance) geared to keeping athletes academically eligible. In this environment, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics seeks to influence policies to better support the academic experiences of student-athletes. The commission has produced reports and built an interactive database that stakeholders in college athletics can use to understand the current state of college sport and the spending it entails (Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, 2017). As a future employee in a sport organization, you can use resources provided by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and other groups (such as the College Sport Research Institute in Columbia, South Carolina) to stay informed about issues facing collegiate athletic administrators.
Case Study
Ethical Challenges in Youth Sport Administration
As fall arrives, you are excited to begin your first season as director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League. Though you look forward to watching the 30 teams play, you also recognize that some coaches and parents have exhibited conduct that does not support the principles of youth sport development, such as fun, fair play, and good sportspersonship. Unfortunately, it is not long into the season before you are approached by a group of disgruntled parents. They allege that the top team in the sixth-grade league (the Smithton Firecrackers) is violating the age requirement established by the league by allowing five players to play on their team who appear to be older and more mature than others in the league. The parents also complain that the coach of the Firecrackers (Coach Sarah) tends to use those five players for the majority of each game and that the scores are therefore lopsided. For example, one parent refers to a game in which her daughter's team lost 11-0 to the "more mature" Firecrackers. The parents also complain that Coach Sarah yells harshly at her players, even though you have received no complaints from parents of players on her team.
Case Study Questions
- Identify the ethical dilemmas presented in this fictional case study.
- Evaluate one of these dilemmas by using the etho-conventional decision-making model for sport managers.
- As director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League, what actions could you take to address the ethical dilemmas identified in question 1?
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Increased diversity brings change to sport organizations
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport.
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport. Depending on where you go, of course, the sport of choice may be hockey, basketball, cross-country skiing, or the world's most popular sport of soccer - but the general appeal of sport is experienced everywhere. Because sport is universal, participant and fan communities are bound to include diversity; therefore, organizations that want to support their participants and fans must reflect and engage those differences. One example can be found in ESPN, which recognizes the importance of diversity in fulfilling its mission: "To serve sports fans wherever sports are watched, listened to, discussed, debated, read about or played" (ESPN, "About," n.d., n.p.). To help it fulfill this mission, ESPN seeks to recruit, hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent the organization's globally diverse group of fans. To find out more about the importance of diversity in ESPN's employment practices, check out the organization's career website at https://jobs.espncareers.com.
As sport organizations continue to become more diverse, the ways in which they work also change. These changes relate to the shift to a more service-based economy in sport (Cunningham, 2015), which of course involves more direct interaction between employees and customers. Indeed, a service-based business succeeds only if it creates high-quality relationships between customers and employees. Researchers have noted that customers who believe they are interacting with people different from themselves experience less satisfaction in the interaction; therefore, building a workforce that reflects the different types of customers engaged by the organization may result in more positive customer service experiences (Cunningham, 2015).
In another ongoing change, both in the sport world and beyond, organizations increasingly use team-based approaches to tackle tasks and projects. In organizations that foster and support a diverse workforce, individuals who work in teams can interact with others who bring a wide variety of experiences, perspectives, and ideas. In this way, their differences can produce better work outcomes for the team and for the organization as a whole. Of course, as we discuss later in this chapter, working in a diverse group also comes with challenges. Therefore, the organization must provide support to help people overcome these challenges in order to make the most of diversity in a work team.
An additional consideration involves the increase in mergers and acquisitions in the sport industry, which sometimes involve global companies and can result in employees working with and for individuals from diverse backgrounds. In 2005, for instance, two of the largest sports apparel organizations merged when Adidas bought Reebok. Though both were international companies, Reebok was headquartered in the United States, whereas Adidas was based in Germany. Thus one of the initial challenges presented by the merger involved how to align the German organizational culture of engineering and design with the more marketing-focused organizational culture of a U.S. company. As this example suggests, the organizations that best support and foster an inclusive work environment enjoy an advantage in responding effectively to mergers and acquisitions. Furthermore, at the local level (e.g., towns, cities, regions), merging sport organizations may provide new and different perspectives on managing those organizations and better serve the needs of diverse customers (Cunningham, 2015).
Diversity in sport organizations can also be affected by legal mandates. In the United States, for instance, civil rights legislation mandates protection against discrimination based on race, gender, age, sex, physical ability, or religion; in addition, some state laws go further by protecting individuals from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The first major U.S. legislation of this type to address the workplace was Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. Later, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 added provisions allowing individuals to recover compensatory and punitive damages for intentional violations of Title VII by an employer (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2009). In another example, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 affords protection for underrepresented groups (e.g., women in sport organizations) and has been used to protect individuals in cases of discrimination, notably sexual harassment. In Canada, the Canadian Human Rights act extends legal protection for individuals regardless of "race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability, or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered" (Canadian Human Rights Act, 2017, n.p.).
Legal mandates notwithstanding, sport organizations that lack a diverse workforce often face ethical challenges, most notably at the senior level (i.e., in the leadership team). One high-profile example can be found in the NFL's struggle to formulate even a barely adequate response to the issue of domestic violence committed by players. In response, calls continue to be made for the league to increase the diversity of its senior leadership - specifically, by including more women - to help it respond more effectively to this issue (Brinson, 2014).
More generally, social pressures have contributed to increased awareness of the need for a diverse workforce in sport organizations (Cunningham, 2015). In this vein, scholar and advocate Richard Lapchick (2016) and his colleagues collect extensive data regarding the racial and gender demographics of employees working in U.S.-based intercollegiate sport organizations and in major professional sport organizations in the United States and beyond. Lapchick and other sport management scholars - including Fink (2016), LaVoi (2016), Burton (2015), Cunningham (2015), and Walker and Melton (2015) - continue to call for an increase in diverse representation in senior leadership positions across sport organizations. The importance of diversity has also been voiced by external stakeholders, such as customers and prospective employees. For example, prospective employees have expressed more positive attitudes toward sport organizations that they believed were more diverse and maintained a more inclusive organizational culture (W. Lee & Cunningham, 2015).
In the Boardroom
Diversity, Inclusion, and Wellness at ESPN
The ESPN Diversity, Inclusion & Wellness team "strives to hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent . . . [the organization's] diverse global fans" (ESPN, "Diversity," n.d., n.p.). ESPN maintains several employee resource groups (ERGs) that are each led by employees and assigned a member of the executive team who serves as a champion for the group. Including more than 2,000 members overall, the ERGs provide a way for employees to connect based on shared interests or backgrounds. Examples include Young Professionals, Women, Asians, People With Disabilities, Latinos, Families, African Americans, and ESPN EQUAL (for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees). The collective mission of the ERGs is to do the following (ESPN, "Diversity"):
- Educate and promote cultural diversity
- Network and learn from others
- Develop professional skill sets
- Add value to the business
- Expand the recruitment base
- Support ESPN's community and diversity outreach partnerships
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Importance of organizational behavior in sport
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders.
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders. In every sector of the sport industry - from grassroots club sport to the high-performance sector - the people who run and contribute to sport organizations are crucial to each organization's daily challenges, trials and tribulations, and, ultimately, success or failure.
The field of organizational behavior (OB) involves the scientific study of individual behavior, group dynamics, and structural choices in organizations (Nelson, Quick, Armstrong, & Condie, 2015). Put simply, OB researchers study people, what they think of and do in their jobs and in their groups, and, more generally, how an organization operates and performs. Such researchers find a wide array of opportunities to examine organizational behavior in the sport industry. For instance, employed work may be performed on either a part-time or a full-time basis in either the amateur or the professional sport industry.
Furthermore, both part-time and full-time work can be done in either an enduring or a temporary organization. Enduring organizations (e.g., the National Hockey League's Montreal Canadiens) have a long and storied history, whereas temporary organizations (e.g., an organizing committee for a sport event - for instance, the 2018 Commonwealth Games) exist for a defined and relatively short period of time. Temporary sport organizations typically rely more heavily on volunteers, particularly at higher levels of performance (e.g., the Olympics) and in the amateur sector both nationally and locally (e.g., Canada Games, club-based sport competitions). Of course, volunteers are also invaluable to enduring organizations, where they support various initiatives, such as community fundraising campaigns. At the amateur level, however, many organizations lack the budget to hire paid staff and therefore rely largely on unpaid volunteers for their success and even for their survival.
The work performed in the sport industry engages many stakeholders, who are also part of what makes sport operations both attractive and specialized. Full-time employees, sport volunteers, athletes, coaches, trainers, administrative support staffers - all of these people have various levels of attachment to their work and to their sport organizations. For instance, the factors that motivate full-time employees to excel at their jobs and advance in their companies are likely to differ from the factors that motivate individuals to volunteer their time without any particular expected return on investment. Differences also exist in their attitudes toward work and their behavior in group and organizational settings. Sport organizations are also distinguished by the variety of actors who may hold relevant technical expertise - sometimes with very different skill sets - such as coaches, players, and administrators.
As sport management began to emerge as a field of study in classrooms across the United States and Canada in the 1980s, scholars borrowed from parent disciplines - such as sport psychology, sociology, and business administration - in order to learn more about the factors that make working in and for sport organizations unique (e.g., transformational leadership in sport administration or coaching, marketing segmentation for sport organizations, the marketing of and through sport). Sport management scholars also began organizing conferences, both in North America (e.g., North American Society for Sport Management, n.d.) and abroad in order to discuss the field and its future. In these formative years of sport management scholarship, the study of people's organizational behavior often concentrated on coaches and administrators. As the field matured, research also addressed other stakeholder issues (e.g., volunteers, gender, ethics, race), marketing literature was further developed, and the study of human resource management in sport organizations emerged.
Thus the study of people in sport organizations was garnering more interest. This growth resulted in part from the increased understanding of the importance of knowledge acquisition relative to the field of sport management and the realization that human capital is one of the most important resources in an organization, regardless of sector. This resource-based view, or RBV (see Barney, 1991), posited that firms are more likely to enjoy sustained advantages if they control resources that are not substitutable and are valuable, rare, and imperfectly imitable. The RBV approach has helped sport management researchers determine the ways in which sport is unique and the ways in which it is similar to other industries.
Acquiring and developing both tangible and intangible resources is crucial to the successful management of an organization. This process requires us to appreciate both the external environment and the internal context of the organization. External forces acting on the organization include economic, political, sociocultural, legal, ecological, demographic, and technological factors. In this competitive global ecosystem, "knowledge and human capital have become essential strategic resources . . . , [and] the process of fostering their creation and deployment has emerged as one of the most important areas of strategic management" (Szymanksi & Wolfe, 2017, p. 26). In these days of fierce competition and rapid change, it is critical that management scholars recognize and understand that attracting, developing, and retaining human talent is a prerequisite for success.
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Future challenges in ethical operations of sport organizations
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead.
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead. Therefore, we encourage you to contemplate other ongoing ethical challenges, as well as those that may yet arise.
Intercollegiate sport will continue to face ethical challenges in both decision making and leadership due to ongoing pressure to win and increase revenue. Specifically, universities continue to rely on athletics as a marketing tool to increase student applications, increase enrollment of out-of-state students, enhance reputation, and, for a small percentage of universities, bring in considerable revenue. As a result, the pressure to win will continue to be felt by athletic directors, administrators, and coaches. At the same time, these individuals also face other pressures, such as fielding the most talented team possible within the academic requirements of the university and ensuring that student-athletes maintain their academic eligibility according to NCAA requirements. These competing pressures can lead to unethical decisions that carry negative implications for all of a university's stakeholders. To see how the desire to win can take precedence over all else, we need only to review the scandal related to alleged sexual assaults, other crimes, and cover-ups by members of the Baylor University football program under the leadership of then-coach Art Briles (Goodwyn, 2017).
On the professional level, both sport leaders and other stakeholders will continue to face the ethical challenge of how to address the growing crisis of traumatic brain injury in contact sports. The NFL and the NHL need to provide honest and ethical leadership that can serve as an example for those in youth sport and interscholastic and intercollegiate sport. Unfortunately, as of yet, league leaders have chosen to resist honest, significant reforms that would help support retired players who suffer from debilitating injuries as a result of head trauma sustained during their playing days (Lupica, 2016; Branch, 2016).
In addition, ethical challenges will continue to be created by technological developments that enable fast and easy sharing of information. Social media platforms (e.g., Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) can closely link fans with players and employees of sport organizations in exciting ways. Yet for all the positive connections they enable, we have also witnessed the ugliness that can occur when individuals hide behind a screen name. This ugliness was brought to the fore in the summer of 2016 by two prominent sports reporters, Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro. In a video that quickly went viral, men read tweets posted about Spain and DiCaro that highlighted the harassment and abuse they have experienced on Twitter. (To view the video, search YouTube for "#MoreThanMean." Warning: The content is disturbing.)Another troubling trend involves the use of social media to attack athletes (usually football players) when they are perceived to be responsible for a team's loss. Athletic departments, and coaches in particular, have been quick to respond to such attacks, but more work needs to be done on the issue - perhaps, for example, establishing a social media code of ethics for fans to follow.
In the Boardroom
The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics
Intercollegiate athletic programs - particularly Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) programs - face significant challenges, including the rising cost of maintaining competitive teams, pressure from stakeholders to win and keep winning, and the need to generate revenue to support their programs. These challenges can lead to ethical issues, including cheating (e.g., fake classes, improper tutoring assistance) geared to keeping athletes academically eligible. In this environment, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics seeks to influence policies to better support the academic experiences of student-athletes. The commission has produced reports and built an interactive database that stakeholders in college athletics can use to understand the current state of college sport and the spending it entails (Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, 2017). As a future employee in a sport organization, you can use resources provided by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and other groups (such as the College Sport Research Institute in Columbia, South Carolina) to stay informed about issues facing collegiate athletic administrators.
Case Study
Ethical Challenges in Youth Sport Administration
As fall arrives, you are excited to begin your first season as director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League. Though you look forward to watching the 30 teams play, you also recognize that some coaches and parents have exhibited conduct that does not support the principles of youth sport development, such as fun, fair play, and good sportspersonship. Unfortunately, it is not long into the season before you are approached by a group of disgruntled parents. They allege that the top team in the sixth-grade league (the Smithton Firecrackers) is violating the age requirement established by the league by allowing five players to play on their team who appear to be older and more mature than others in the league. The parents also complain that the coach of the Firecrackers (Coach Sarah) tends to use those five players for the majority of each game and that the scores are therefore lopsided. For example, one parent refers to a game in which her daughter's team lost 11-0 to the "more mature" Firecrackers. The parents also complain that Coach Sarah yells harshly at her players, even though you have received no complaints from parents of players on her team.
Case Study Questions
- Identify the ethical dilemmas presented in this fictional case study.
- Evaluate one of these dilemmas by using the etho-conventional decision-making model for sport managers.
- As director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League, what actions could you take to address the ethical dilemmas identified in question 1?
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Increased diversity brings change to sport organizations
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport.
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport. Depending on where you go, of course, the sport of choice may be hockey, basketball, cross-country skiing, or the world's most popular sport of soccer - but the general appeal of sport is experienced everywhere. Because sport is universal, participant and fan communities are bound to include diversity; therefore, organizations that want to support their participants and fans must reflect and engage those differences. One example can be found in ESPN, which recognizes the importance of diversity in fulfilling its mission: "To serve sports fans wherever sports are watched, listened to, discussed, debated, read about or played" (ESPN, "About," n.d., n.p.). To help it fulfill this mission, ESPN seeks to recruit, hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent the organization's globally diverse group of fans. To find out more about the importance of diversity in ESPN's employment practices, check out the organization's career website at https://jobs.espncareers.com.
As sport organizations continue to become more diverse, the ways in which they work also change. These changes relate to the shift to a more service-based economy in sport (Cunningham, 2015), which of course involves more direct interaction between employees and customers. Indeed, a service-based business succeeds only if it creates high-quality relationships between customers and employees. Researchers have noted that customers who believe they are interacting with people different from themselves experience less satisfaction in the interaction; therefore, building a workforce that reflects the different types of customers engaged by the organization may result in more positive customer service experiences (Cunningham, 2015).
In another ongoing change, both in the sport world and beyond, organizations increasingly use team-based approaches to tackle tasks and projects. In organizations that foster and support a diverse workforce, individuals who work in teams can interact with others who bring a wide variety of experiences, perspectives, and ideas. In this way, their differences can produce better work outcomes for the team and for the organization as a whole. Of course, as we discuss later in this chapter, working in a diverse group also comes with challenges. Therefore, the organization must provide support to help people overcome these challenges in order to make the most of diversity in a work team.
An additional consideration involves the increase in mergers and acquisitions in the sport industry, which sometimes involve global companies and can result in employees working with and for individuals from diverse backgrounds. In 2005, for instance, two of the largest sports apparel organizations merged when Adidas bought Reebok. Though both were international companies, Reebok was headquartered in the United States, whereas Adidas was based in Germany. Thus one of the initial challenges presented by the merger involved how to align the German organizational culture of engineering and design with the more marketing-focused organizational culture of a U.S. company. As this example suggests, the organizations that best support and foster an inclusive work environment enjoy an advantage in responding effectively to mergers and acquisitions. Furthermore, at the local level (e.g., towns, cities, regions), merging sport organizations may provide new and different perspectives on managing those organizations and better serve the needs of diverse customers (Cunningham, 2015).
Diversity in sport organizations can also be affected by legal mandates. In the United States, for instance, civil rights legislation mandates protection against discrimination based on race, gender, age, sex, physical ability, or religion; in addition, some state laws go further by protecting individuals from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The first major U.S. legislation of this type to address the workplace was Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. Later, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 added provisions allowing individuals to recover compensatory and punitive damages for intentional violations of Title VII by an employer (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2009). In another example, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 affords protection for underrepresented groups (e.g., women in sport organizations) and has been used to protect individuals in cases of discrimination, notably sexual harassment. In Canada, the Canadian Human Rights act extends legal protection for individuals regardless of "race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability, or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered" (Canadian Human Rights Act, 2017, n.p.).
Legal mandates notwithstanding, sport organizations that lack a diverse workforce often face ethical challenges, most notably at the senior level (i.e., in the leadership team). One high-profile example can be found in the NFL's struggle to formulate even a barely adequate response to the issue of domestic violence committed by players. In response, calls continue to be made for the league to increase the diversity of its senior leadership - specifically, by including more women - to help it respond more effectively to this issue (Brinson, 2014).
More generally, social pressures have contributed to increased awareness of the need for a diverse workforce in sport organizations (Cunningham, 2015). In this vein, scholar and advocate Richard Lapchick (2016) and his colleagues collect extensive data regarding the racial and gender demographics of employees working in U.S.-based intercollegiate sport organizations and in major professional sport organizations in the United States and beyond. Lapchick and other sport management scholars - including Fink (2016), LaVoi (2016), Burton (2015), Cunningham (2015), and Walker and Melton (2015) - continue to call for an increase in diverse representation in senior leadership positions across sport organizations. The importance of diversity has also been voiced by external stakeholders, such as customers and prospective employees. For example, prospective employees have expressed more positive attitudes toward sport organizations that they believed were more diverse and maintained a more inclusive organizational culture (W. Lee & Cunningham, 2015).
In the Boardroom
Diversity, Inclusion, and Wellness at ESPN
The ESPN Diversity, Inclusion & Wellness team "strives to hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent . . . [the organization's] diverse global fans" (ESPN, "Diversity," n.d., n.p.). ESPN maintains several employee resource groups (ERGs) that are each led by employees and assigned a member of the executive team who serves as a champion for the group. Including more than 2,000 members overall, the ERGs provide a way for employees to connect based on shared interests or backgrounds. Examples include Young Professionals, Women, Asians, People With Disabilities, Latinos, Families, African Americans, and ESPN EQUAL (for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees). The collective mission of the ERGs is to do the following (ESPN, "Diversity"):
- Educate and promote cultural diversity
- Network and learn from others
- Develop professional skill sets
- Add value to the business
- Expand the recruitment base
- Support ESPN's community and diversity outreach partnerships
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Importance of organizational behavior in sport
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders.
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders. In every sector of the sport industry - from grassroots club sport to the high-performance sector - the people who run and contribute to sport organizations are crucial to each organization's daily challenges, trials and tribulations, and, ultimately, success or failure.
The field of organizational behavior (OB) involves the scientific study of individual behavior, group dynamics, and structural choices in organizations (Nelson, Quick, Armstrong, & Condie, 2015). Put simply, OB researchers study people, what they think of and do in their jobs and in their groups, and, more generally, how an organization operates and performs. Such researchers find a wide array of opportunities to examine organizational behavior in the sport industry. For instance, employed work may be performed on either a part-time or a full-time basis in either the amateur or the professional sport industry.
Furthermore, both part-time and full-time work can be done in either an enduring or a temporary organization. Enduring organizations (e.g., the National Hockey League's Montreal Canadiens) have a long and storied history, whereas temporary organizations (e.g., an organizing committee for a sport event - for instance, the 2018 Commonwealth Games) exist for a defined and relatively short period of time. Temporary sport organizations typically rely more heavily on volunteers, particularly at higher levels of performance (e.g., the Olympics) and in the amateur sector both nationally and locally (e.g., Canada Games, club-based sport competitions). Of course, volunteers are also invaluable to enduring organizations, where they support various initiatives, such as community fundraising campaigns. At the amateur level, however, many organizations lack the budget to hire paid staff and therefore rely largely on unpaid volunteers for their success and even for their survival.
The work performed in the sport industry engages many stakeholders, who are also part of what makes sport operations both attractive and specialized. Full-time employees, sport volunteers, athletes, coaches, trainers, administrative support staffers - all of these people have various levels of attachment to their work and to their sport organizations. For instance, the factors that motivate full-time employees to excel at their jobs and advance in their companies are likely to differ from the factors that motivate individuals to volunteer their time without any particular expected return on investment. Differences also exist in their attitudes toward work and their behavior in group and organizational settings. Sport organizations are also distinguished by the variety of actors who may hold relevant technical expertise - sometimes with very different skill sets - such as coaches, players, and administrators.
As sport management began to emerge as a field of study in classrooms across the United States and Canada in the 1980s, scholars borrowed from parent disciplines - such as sport psychology, sociology, and business administration - in order to learn more about the factors that make working in and for sport organizations unique (e.g., transformational leadership in sport administration or coaching, marketing segmentation for sport organizations, the marketing of and through sport). Sport management scholars also began organizing conferences, both in North America (e.g., North American Society for Sport Management, n.d.) and abroad in order to discuss the field and its future. In these formative years of sport management scholarship, the study of people's organizational behavior often concentrated on coaches and administrators. As the field matured, research also addressed other stakeholder issues (e.g., volunteers, gender, ethics, race), marketing literature was further developed, and the study of human resource management in sport organizations emerged.
Thus the study of people in sport organizations was garnering more interest. This growth resulted in part from the increased understanding of the importance of knowledge acquisition relative to the field of sport management and the realization that human capital is one of the most important resources in an organization, regardless of sector. This resource-based view, or RBV (see Barney, 1991), posited that firms are more likely to enjoy sustained advantages if they control resources that are not substitutable and are valuable, rare, and imperfectly imitable. The RBV approach has helped sport management researchers determine the ways in which sport is unique and the ways in which it is similar to other industries.
Acquiring and developing both tangible and intangible resources is crucial to the successful management of an organization. This process requires us to appreciate both the external environment and the internal context of the organization. External forces acting on the organization include economic, political, sociocultural, legal, ecological, demographic, and technological factors. In this competitive global ecosystem, "knowledge and human capital have become essential strategic resources . . . , [and] the process of fostering their creation and deployment has emerged as one of the most important areas of strategic management" (Szymanksi & Wolfe, 2017, p. 26). In these days of fierce competition and rapid change, it is critical that management scholars recognize and understand that attracting, developing, and retaining human talent is a prerequisite for success.
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Future challenges in ethical operations of sport organizations
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead.
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead. Therefore, we encourage you to contemplate other ongoing ethical challenges, as well as those that may yet arise.
Intercollegiate sport will continue to face ethical challenges in both decision making and leadership due to ongoing pressure to win and increase revenue. Specifically, universities continue to rely on athletics as a marketing tool to increase student applications, increase enrollment of out-of-state students, enhance reputation, and, for a small percentage of universities, bring in considerable revenue. As a result, the pressure to win will continue to be felt by athletic directors, administrators, and coaches. At the same time, these individuals also face other pressures, such as fielding the most talented team possible within the academic requirements of the university and ensuring that student-athletes maintain their academic eligibility according to NCAA requirements. These competing pressures can lead to unethical decisions that carry negative implications for all of a university's stakeholders. To see how the desire to win can take precedence over all else, we need only to review the scandal related to alleged sexual assaults, other crimes, and cover-ups by members of the Baylor University football program under the leadership of then-coach Art Briles (Goodwyn, 2017).
On the professional level, both sport leaders and other stakeholders will continue to face the ethical challenge of how to address the growing crisis of traumatic brain injury in contact sports. The NFL and the NHL need to provide honest and ethical leadership that can serve as an example for those in youth sport and interscholastic and intercollegiate sport. Unfortunately, as of yet, league leaders have chosen to resist honest, significant reforms that would help support retired players who suffer from debilitating injuries as a result of head trauma sustained during their playing days (Lupica, 2016; Branch, 2016).
In addition, ethical challenges will continue to be created by technological developments that enable fast and easy sharing of information. Social media platforms (e.g., Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) can closely link fans with players and employees of sport organizations in exciting ways. Yet for all the positive connections they enable, we have also witnessed the ugliness that can occur when individuals hide behind a screen name. This ugliness was brought to the fore in the summer of 2016 by two prominent sports reporters, Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro. In a video that quickly went viral, men read tweets posted about Spain and DiCaro that highlighted the harassment and abuse they have experienced on Twitter. (To view the video, search YouTube for "#MoreThanMean." Warning: The content is disturbing.)Another troubling trend involves the use of social media to attack athletes (usually football players) when they are perceived to be responsible for a team's loss. Athletic departments, and coaches in particular, have been quick to respond to such attacks, but more work needs to be done on the issue - perhaps, for example, establishing a social media code of ethics for fans to follow.
In the Boardroom
The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics
Intercollegiate athletic programs - particularly Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) programs - face significant challenges, including the rising cost of maintaining competitive teams, pressure from stakeholders to win and keep winning, and the need to generate revenue to support their programs. These challenges can lead to ethical issues, including cheating (e.g., fake classes, improper tutoring assistance) geared to keeping athletes academically eligible. In this environment, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics seeks to influence policies to better support the academic experiences of student-athletes. The commission has produced reports and built an interactive database that stakeholders in college athletics can use to understand the current state of college sport and the spending it entails (Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, 2017). As a future employee in a sport organization, you can use resources provided by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and other groups (such as the College Sport Research Institute in Columbia, South Carolina) to stay informed about issues facing collegiate athletic administrators.
Case Study
Ethical Challenges in Youth Sport Administration
As fall arrives, you are excited to begin your first season as director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League. Though you look forward to watching the 30 teams play, you also recognize that some coaches and parents have exhibited conduct that does not support the principles of youth sport development, such as fun, fair play, and good sportspersonship. Unfortunately, it is not long into the season before you are approached by a group of disgruntled parents. They allege that the top team in the sixth-grade league (the Smithton Firecrackers) is violating the age requirement established by the league by allowing five players to play on their team who appear to be older and more mature than others in the league. The parents also complain that the coach of the Firecrackers (Coach Sarah) tends to use those five players for the majority of each game and that the scores are therefore lopsided. For example, one parent refers to a game in which her daughter's team lost 11-0 to the "more mature" Firecrackers. The parents also complain that Coach Sarah yells harshly at her players, even though you have received no complaints from parents of players on her team.
Case Study Questions
- Identify the ethical dilemmas presented in this fictional case study.
- Evaluate one of these dilemmas by using the etho-conventional decision-making model for sport managers.
- As director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League, what actions could you take to address the ethical dilemmas identified in question 1?
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Increased diversity brings change to sport organizations
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport.
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport. Depending on where you go, of course, the sport of choice may be hockey, basketball, cross-country skiing, or the world's most popular sport of soccer - but the general appeal of sport is experienced everywhere. Because sport is universal, participant and fan communities are bound to include diversity; therefore, organizations that want to support their participants and fans must reflect and engage those differences. One example can be found in ESPN, which recognizes the importance of diversity in fulfilling its mission: "To serve sports fans wherever sports are watched, listened to, discussed, debated, read about or played" (ESPN, "About," n.d., n.p.). To help it fulfill this mission, ESPN seeks to recruit, hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent the organization's globally diverse group of fans. To find out more about the importance of diversity in ESPN's employment practices, check out the organization's career website at https://jobs.espncareers.com.
As sport organizations continue to become more diverse, the ways in which they work also change. These changes relate to the shift to a more service-based economy in sport (Cunningham, 2015), which of course involves more direct interaction between employees and customers. Indeed, a service-based business succeeds only if it creates high-quality relationships between customers and employees. Researchers have noted that customers who believe they are interacting with people different from themselves experience less satisfaction in the interaction; therefore, building a workforce that reflects the different types of customers engaged by the organization may result in more positive customer service experiences (Cunningham, 2015).
In another ongoing change, both in the sport world and beyond, organizations increasingly use team-based approaches to tackle tasks and projects. In organizations that foster and support a diverse workforce, individuals who work in teams can interact with others who bring a wide variety of experiences, perspectives, and ideas. In this way, their differences can produce better work outcomes for the team and for the organization as a whole. Of course, as we discuss later in this chapter, working in a diverse group also comes with challenges. Therefore, the organization must provide support to help people overcome these challenges in order to make the most of diversity in a work team.
An additional consideration involves the increase in mergers and acquisitions in the sport industry, which sometimes involve global companies and can result in employees working with and for individuals from diverse backgrounds. In 2005, for instance, two of the largest sports apparel organizations merged when Adidas bought Reebok. Though both were international companies, Reebok was headquartered in the United States, whereas Adidas was based in Germany. Thus one of the initial challenges presented by the merger involved how to align the German organizational culture of engineering and design with the more marketing-focused organizational culture of a U.S. company. As this example suggests, the organizations that best support and foster an inclusive work environment enjoy an advantage in responding effectively to mergers and acquisitions. Furthermore, at the local level (e.g., towns, cities, regions), merging sport organizations may provide new and different perspectives on managing those organizations and better serve the needs of diverse customers (Cunningham, 2015).
Diversity in sport organizations can also be affected by legal mandates. In the United States, for instance, civil rights legislation mandates protection against discrimination based on race, gender, age, sex, physical ability, or religion; in addition, some state laws go further by protecting individuals from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The first major U.S. legislation of this type to address the workplace was Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. Later, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 added provisions allowing individuals to recover compensatory and punitive damages for intentional violations of Title VII by an employer (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2009). In another example, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 affords protection for underrepresented groups (e.g., women in sport organizations) and has been used to protect individuals in cases of discrimination, notably sexual harassment. In Canada, the Canadian Human Rights act extends legal protection for individuals regardless of "race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability, or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered" (Canadian Human Rights Act, 2017, n.p.).
Legal mandates notwithstanding, sport organizations that lack a diverse workforce often face ethical challenges, most notably at the senior level (i.e., in the leadership team). One high-profile example can be found in the NFL's struggle to formulate even a barely adequate response to the issue of domestic violence committed by players. In response, calls continue to be made for the league to increase the diversity of its senior leadership - specifically, by including more women - to help it respond more effectively to this issue (Brinson, 2014).
More generally, social pressures have contributed to increased awareness of the need for a diverse workforce in sport organizations (Cunningham, 2015). In this vein, scholar and advocate Richard Lapchick (2016) and his colleagues collect extensive data regarding the racial and gender demographics of employees working in U.S.-based intercollegiate sport organizations and in major professional sport organizations in the United States and beyond. Lapchick and other sport management scholars - including Fink (2016), LaVoi (2016), Burton (2015), Cunningham (2015), and Walker and Melton (2015) - continue to call for an increase in diverse representation in senior leadership positions across sport organizations. The importance of diversity has also been voiced by external stakeholders, such as customers and prospective employees. For example, prospective employees have expressed more positive attitudes toward sport organizations that they believed were more diverse and maintained a more inclusive organizational culture (W. Lee & Cunningham, 2015).
In the Boardroom
Diversity, Inclusion, and Wellness at ESPN
The ESPN Diversity, Inclusion & Wellness team "strives to hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent . . . [the organization's] diverse global fans" (ESPN, "Diversity," n.d., n.p.). ESPN maintains several employee resource groups (ERGs) that are each led by employees and assigned a member of the executive team who serves as a champion for the group. Including more than 2,000 members overall, the ERGs provide a way for employees to connect based on shared interests or backgrounds. Examples include Young Professionals, Women, Asians, People With Disabilities, Latinos, Families, African Americans, and ESPN EQUAL (for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees). The collective mission of the ERGs is to do the following (ESPN, "Diversity"):
- Educate and promote cultural diversity
- Network and learn from others
- Develop professional skill sets
- Add value to the business
- Expand the recruitment base
- Support ESPN's community and diversity outreach partnerships
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Importance of organizational behavior in sport
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders.
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders. In every sector of the sport industry - from grassroots club sport to the high-performance sector - the people who run and contribute to sport organizations are crucial to each organization's daily challenges, trials and tribulations, and, ultimately, success or failure.
The field of organizational behavior (OB) involves the scientific study of individual behavior, group dynamics, and structural choices in organizations (Nelson, Quick, Armstrong, & Condie, 2015). Put simply, OB researchers study people, what they think of and do in their jobs and in their groups, and, more generally, how an organization operates and performs. Such researchers find a wide array of opportunities to examine organizational behavior in the sport industry. For instance, employed work may be performed on either a part-time or a full-time basis in either the amateur or the professional sport industry.
Furthermore, both part-time and full-time work can be done in either an enduring or a temporary organization. Enduring organizations (e.g., the National Hockey League's Montreal Canadiens) have a long and storied history, whereas temporary organizations (e.g., an organizing committee for a sport event - for instance, the 2018 Commonwealth Games) exist for a defined and relatively short period of time. Temporary sport organizations typically rely more heavily on volunteers, particularly at higher levels of performance (e.g., the Olympics) and in the amateur sector both nationally and locally (e.g., Canada Games, club-based sport competitions). Of course, volunteers are also invaluable to enduring organizations, where they support various initiatives, such as community fundraising campaigns. At the amateur level, however, many organizations lack the budget to hire paid staff and therefore rely largely on unpaid volunteers for their success and even for their survival.
The work performed in the sport industry engages many stakeholders, who are also part of what makes sport operations both attractive and specialized. Full-time employees, sport volunteers, athletes, coaches, trainers, administrative support staffers - all of these people have various levels of attachment to their work and to their sport organizations. For instance, the factors that motivate full-time employees to excel at their jobs and advance in their companies are likely to differ from the factors that motivate individuals to volunteer their time without any particular expected return on investment. Differences also exist in their attitudes toward work and their behavior in group and organizational settings. Sport organizations are also distinguished by the variety of actors who may hold relevant technical expertise - sometimes with very different skill sets - such as coaches, players, and administrators.
As sport management began to emerge as a field of study in classrooms across the United States and Canada in the 1980s, scholars borrowed from parent disciplines - such as sport psychology, sociology, and business administration - in order to learn more about the factors that make working in and for sport organizations unique (e.g., transformational leadership in sport administration or coaching, marketing segmentation for sport organizations, the marketing of and through sport). Sport management scholars also began organizing conferences, both in North America (e.g., North American Society for Sport Management, n.d.) and abroad in order to discuss the field and its future. In these formative years of sport management scholarship, the study of people's organizational behavior often concentrated on coaches and administrators. As the field matured, research also addressed other stakeholder issues (e.g., volunteers, gender, ethics, race), marketing literature was further developed, and the study of human resource management in sport organizations emerged.
Thus the study of people in sport organizations was garnering more interest. This growth resulted in part from the increased understanding of the importance of knowledge acquisition relative to the field of sport management and the realization that human capital is one of the most important resources in an organization, regardless of sector. This resource-based view, or RBV (see Barney, 1991), posited that firms are more likely to enjoy sustained advantages if they control resources that are not substitutable and are valuable, rare, and imperfectly imitable. The RBV approach has helped sport management researchers determine the ways in which sport is unique and the ways in which it is similar to other industries.
Acquiring and developing both tangible and intangible resources is crucial to the successful management of an organization. This process requires us to appreciate both the external environment and the internal context of the organization. External forces acting on the organization include economic, political, sociocultural, legal, ecological, demographic, and technological factors. In this competitive global ecosystem, "knowledge and human capital have become essential strategic resources . . . , [and] the process of fostering their creation and deployment has emerged as one of the most important areas of strategic management" (Szymanksi & Wolfe, 2017, p. 26). In these days of fierce competition and rapid change, it is critical that management scholars recognize and understand that attracting, developing, and retaining human talent is a prerequisite for success.
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Future challenges in ethical operations of sport organizations
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead.
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead. Therefore, we encourage you to contemplate other ongoing ethical challenges, as well as those that may yet arise.
Intercollegiate sport will continue to face ethical challenges in both decision making and leadership due to ongoing pressure to win and increase revenue. Specifically, universities continue to rely on athletics as a marketing tool to increase student applications, increase enrollment of out-of-state students, enhance reputation, and, for a small percentage of universities, bring in considerable revenue. As a result, the pressure to win will continue to be felt by athletic directors, administrators, and coaches. At the same time, these individuals also face other pressures, such as fielding the most talented team possible within the academic requirements of the university and ensuring that student-athletes maintain their academic eligibility according to NCAA requirements. These competing pressures can lead to unethical decisions that carry negative implications for all of a university's stakeholders. To see how the desire to win can take precedence over all else, we need only to review the scandal related to alleged sexual assaults, other crimes, and cover-ups by members of the Baylor University football program under the leadership of then-coach Art Briles (Goodwyn, 2017).
On the professional level, both sport leaders and other stakeholders will continue to face the ethical challenge of how to address the growing crisis of traumatic brain injury in contact sports. The NFL and the NHL need to provide honest and ethical leadership that can serve as an example for those in youth sport and interscholastic and intercollegiate sport. Unfortunately, as of yet, league leaders have chosen to resist honest, significant reforms that would help support retired players who suffer from debilitating injuries as a result of head trauma sustained during their playing days (Lupica, 2016; Branch, 2016).
In addition, ethical challenges will continue to be created by technological developments that enable fast and easy sharing of information. Social media platforms (e.g., Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) can closely link fans with players and employees of sport organizations in exciting ways. Yet for all the positive connections they enable, we have also witnessed the ugliness that can occur when individuals hide behind a screen name. This ugliness was brought to the fore in the summer of 2016 by two prominent sports reporters, Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro. In a video that quickly went viral, men read tweets posted about Spain and DiCaro that highlighted the harassment and abuse they have experienced on Twitter. (To view the video, search YouTube for "#MoreThanMean." Warning: The content is disturbing.)Another troubling trend involves the use of social media to attack athletes (usually football players) when they are perceived to be responsible for a team's loss. Athletic departments, and coaches in particular, have been quick to respond to such attacks, but more work needs to be done on the issue - perhaps, for example, establishing a social media code of ethics for fans to follow.
In the Boardroom
The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics
Intercollegiate athletic programs - particularly Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) programs - face significant challenges, including the rising cost of maintaining competitive teams, pressure from stakeholders to win and keep winning, and the need to generate revenue to support their programs. These challenges can lead to ethical issues, including cheating (e.g., fake classes, improper tutoring assistance) geared to keeping athletes academically eligible. In this environment, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics seeks to influence policies to better support the academic experiences of student-athletes. The commission has produced reports and built an interactive database that stakeholders in college athletics can use to understand the current state of college sport and the spending it entails (Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, 2017). As a future employee in a sport organization, you can use resources provided by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and other groups (such as the College Sport Research Institute in Columbia, South Carolina) to stay informed about issues facing collegiate athletic administrators.
Case Study
Ethical Challenges in Youth Sport Administration
As fall arrives, you are excited to begin your first season as director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League. Though you look forward to watching the 30 teams play, you also recognize that some coaches and parents have exhibited conduct that does not support the principles of youth sport development, such as fun, fair play, and good sportspersonship. Unfortunately, it is not long into the season before you are approached by a group of disgruntled parents. They allege that the top team in the sixth-grade league (the Smithton Firecrackers) is violating the age requirement established by the league by allowing five players to play on their team who appear to be older and more mature than others in the league. The parents also complain that the coach of the Firecrackers (Coach Sarah) tends to use those five players for the majority of each game and that the scores are therefore lopsided. For example, one parent refers to a game in which her daughter's team lost 11-0 to the "more mature" Firecrackers. The parents also complain that Coach Sarah yells harshly at her players, even though you have received no complaints from parents of players on her team.
Case Study Questions
- Identify the ethical dilemmas presented in this fictional case study.
- Evaluate one of these dilemmas by using the etho-conventional decision-making model for sport managers.
- As director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League, what actions could you take to address the ethical dilemmas identified in question 1?
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Increased diversity brings change to sport organizations
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport.
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport. Depending on where you go, of course, the sport of choice may be hockey, basketball, cross-country skiing, or the world's most popular sport of soccer - but the general appeal of sport is experienced everywhere. Because sport is universal, participant and fan communities are bound to include diversity; therefore, organizations that want to support their participants and fans must reflect and engage those differences. One example can be found in ESPN, which recognizes the importance of diversity in fulfilling its mission: "To serve sports fans wherever sports are watched, listened to, discussed, debated, read about or played" (ESPN, "About," n.d., n.p.). To help it fulfill this mission, ESPN seeks to recruit, hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent the organization's globally diverse group of fans. To find out more about the importance of diversity in ESPN's employment practices, check out the organization's career website at https://jobs.espncareers.com.
As sport organizations continue to become more diverse, the ways in which they work also change. These changes relate to the shift to a more service-based economy in sport (Cunningham, 2015), which of course involves more direct interaction between employees and customers. Indeed, a service-based business succeeds only if it creates high-quality relationships between customers and employees. Researchers have noted that customers who believe they are interacting with people different from themselves experience less satisfaction in the interaction; therefore, building a workforce that reflects the different types of customers engaged by the organization may result in more positive customer service experiences (Cunningham, 2015).
In another ongoing change, both in the sport world and beyond, organizations increasingly use team-based approaches to tackle tasks and projects. In organizations that foster and support a diverse workforce, individuals who work in teams can interact with others who bring a wide variety of experiences, perspectives, and ideas. In this way, their differences can produce better work outcomes for the team and for the organization as a whole. Of course, as we discuss later in this chapter, working in a diverse group also comes with challenges. Therefore, the organization must provide support to help people overcome these challenges in order to make the most of diversity in a work team.
An additional consideration involves the increase in mergers and acquisitions in the sport industry, which sometimes involve global companies and can result in employees working with and for individuals from diverse backgrounds. In 2005, for instance, two of the largest sports apparel organizations merged when Adidas bought Reebok. Though both were international companies, Reebok was headquartered in the United States, whereas Adidas was based in Germany. Thus one of the initial challenges presented by the merger involved how to align the German organizational culture of engineering and design with the more marketing-focused organizational culture of a U.S. company. As this example suggests, the organizations that best support and foster an inclusive work environment enjoy an advantage in responding effectively to mergers and acquisitions. Furthermore, at the local level (e.g., towns, cities, regions), merging sport organizations may provide new and different perspectives on managing those organizations and better serve the needs of diverse customers (Cunningham, 2015).
Diversity in sport organizations can also be affected by legal mandates. In the United States, for instance, civil rights legislation mandates protection against discrimination based on race, gender, age, sex, physical ability, or religion; in addition, some state laws go further by protecting individuals from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The first major U.S. legislation of this type to address the workplace was Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. Later, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 added provisions allowing individuals to recover compensatory and punitive damages for intentional violations of Title VII by an employer (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2009). In another example, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 affords protection for underrepresented groups (e.g., women in sport organizations) and has been used to protect individuals in cases of discrimination, notably sexual harassment. In Canada, the Canadian Human Rights act extends legal protection for individuals regardless of "race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability, or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered" (Canadian Human Rights Act, 2017, n.p.).
Legal mandates notwithstanding, sport organizations that lack a diverse workforce often face ethical challenges, most notably at the senior level (i.e., in the leadership team). One high-profile example can be found in the NFL's struggle to formulate even a barely adequate response to the issue of domestic violence committed by players. In response, calls continue to be made for the league to increase the diversity of its senior leadership - specifically, by including more women - to help it respond more effectively to this issue (Brinson, 2014).
More generally, social pressures have contributed to increased awareness of the need for a diverse workforce in sport organizations (Cunningham, 2015). In this vein, scholar and advocate Richard Lapchick (2016) and his colleagues collect extensive data regarding the racial and gender demographics of employees working in U.S.-based intercollegiate sport organizations and in major professional sport organizations in the United States and beyond. Lapchick and other sport management scholars - including Fink (2016), LaVoi (2016), Burton (2015), Cunningham (2015), and Walker and Melton (2015) - continue to call for an increase in diverse representation in senior leadership positions across sport organizations. The importance of diversity has also been voiced by external stakeholders, such as customers and prospective employees. For example, prospective employees have expressed more positive attitudes toward sport organizations that they believed were more diverse and maintained a more inclusive organizational culture (W. Lee & Cunningham, 2015).
In the Boardroom
Diversity, Inclusion, and Wellness at ESPN
The ESPN Diversity, Inclusion & Wellness team "strives to hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent . . . [the organization's] diverse global fans" (ESPN, "Diversity," n.d., n.p.). ESPN maintains several employee resource groups (ERGs) that are each led by employees and assigned a member of the executive team who serves as a champion for the group. Including more than 2,000 members overall, the ERGs provide a way for employees to connect based on shared interests or backgrounds. Examples include Young Professionals, Women, Asians, People With Disabilities, Latinos, Families, African Americans, and ESPN EQUAL (for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees). The collective mission of the ERGs is to do the following (ESPN, "Diversity"):
- Educate and promote cultural diversity
- Network and learn from others
- Develop professional skill sets
- Add value to the business
- Expand the recruitment base
- Support ESPN's community and diversity outreach partnerships
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Importance of organizational behavior in sport
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders.
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders. In every sector of the sport industry - from grassroots club sport to the high-performance sector - the people who run and contribute to sport organizations are crucial to each organization's daily challenges, trials and tribulations, and, ultimately, success or failure.
The field of organizational behavior (OB) involves the scientific study of individual behavior, group dynamics, and structural choices in organizations (Nelson, Quick, Armstrong, & Condie, 2015). Put simply, OB researchers study people, what they think of and do in their jobs and in their groups, and, more generally, how an organization operates and performs. Such researchers find a wide array of opportunities to examine organizational behavior in the sport industry. For instance, employed work may be performed on either a part-time or a full-time basis in either the amateur or the professional sport industry.
Furthermore, both part-time and full-time work can be done in either an enduring or a temporary organization. Enduring organizations (e.g., the National Hockey League's Montreal Canadiens) have a long and storied history, whereas temporary organizations (e.g., an organizing committee for a sport event - for instance, the 2018 Commonwealth Games) exist for a defined and relatively short period of time. Temporary sport organizations typically rely more heavily on volunteers, particularly at higher levels of performance (e.g., the Olympics) and in the amateur sector both nationally and locally (e.g., Canada Games, club-based sport competitions). Of course, volunteers are also invaluable to enduring organizations, where they support various initiatives, such as community fundraising campaigns. At the amateur level, however, many organizations lack the budget to hire paid staff and therefore rely largely on unpaid volunteers for their success and even for their survival.
The work performed in the sport industry engages many stakeholders, who are also part of what makes sport operations both attractive and specialized. Full-time employees, sport volunteers, athletes, coaches, trainers, administrative support staffers - all of these people have various levels of attachment to their work and to their sport organizations. For instance, the factors that motivate full-time employees to excel at their jobs and advance in their companies are likely to differ from the factors that motivate individuals to volunteer their time without any particular expected return on investment. Differences also exist in their attitudes toward work and their behavior in group and organizational settings. Sport organizations are also distinguished by the variety of actors who may hold relevant technical expertise - sometimes with very different skill sets - such as coaches, players, and administrators.
As sport management began to emerge as a field of study in classrooms across the United States and Canada in the 1980s, scholars borrowed from parent disciplines - such as sport psychology, sociology, and business administration - in order to learn more about the factors that make working in and for sport organizations unique (e.g., transformational leadership in sport administration or coaching, marketing segmentation for sport organizations, the marketing of and through sport). Sport management scholars also began organizing conferences, both in North America (e.g., North American Society for Sport Management, n.d.) and abroad in order to discuss the field and its future. In these formative years of sport management scholarship, the study of people's organizational behavior often concentrated on coaches and administrators. As the field matured, research also addressed other stakeholder issues (e.g., volunteers, gender, ethics, race), marketing literature was further developed, and the study of human resource management in sport organizations emerged.
Thus the study of people in sport organizations was garnering more interest. This growth resulted in part from the increased understanding of the importance of knowledge acquisition relative to the field of sport management and the realization that human capital is one of the most important resources in an organization, regardless of sector. This resource-based view, or RBV (see Barney, 1991), posited that firms are more likely to enjoy sustained advantages if they control resources that are not substitutable and are valuable, rare, and imperfectly imitable. The RBV approach has helped sport management researchers determine the ways in which sport is unique and the ways in which it is similar to other industries.
Acquiring and developing both tangible and intangible resources is crucial to the successful management of an organization. This process requires us to appreciate both the external environment and the internal context of the organization. External forces acting on the organization include economic, political, sociocultural, legal, ecological, demographic, and technological factors. In this competitive global ecosystem, "knowledge and human capital have become essential strategic resources . . . , [and] the process of fostering their creation and deployment has emerged as one of the most important areas of strategic management" (Szymanksi & Wolfe, 2017, p. 26). In these days of fierce competition and rapid change, it is critical that management scholars recognize and understand that attracting, developing, and retaining human talent is a prerequisite for success.
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Future challenges in ethical operations of sport organizations
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead.
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead. Therefore, we encourage you to contemplate other ongoing ethical challenges, as well as those that may yet arise.
Intercollegiate sport will continue to face ethical challenges in both decision making and leadership due to ongoing pressure to win and increase revenue. Specifically, universities continue to rely on athletics as a marketing tool to increase student applications, increase enrollment of out-of-state students, enhance reputation, and, for a small percentage of universities, bring in considerable revenue. As a result, the pressure to win will continue to be felt by athletic directors, administrators, and coaches. At the same time, these individuals also face other pressures, such as fielding the most talented team possible within the academic requirements of the university and ensuring that student-athletes maintain their academic eligibility according to NCAA requirements. These competing pressures can lead to unethical decisions that carry negative implications for all of a university's stakeholders. To see how the desire to win can take precedence over all else, we need only to review the scandal related to alleged sexual assaults, other crimes, and cover-ups by members of the Baylor University football program under the leadership of then-coach Art Briles (Goodwyn, 2017).
On the professional level, both sport leaders and other stakeholders will continue to face the ethical challenge of how to address the growing crisis of traumatic brain injury in contact sports. The NFL and the NHL need to provide honest and ethical leadership that can serve as an example for those in youth sport and interscholastic and intercollegiate sport. Unfortunately, as of yet, league leaders have chosen to resist honest, significant reforms that would help support retired players who suffer from debilitating injuries as a result of head trauma sustained during their playing days (Lupica, 2016; Branch, 2016).
In addition, ethical challenges will continue to be created by technological developments that enable fast and easy sharing of information. Social media platforms (e.g., Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) can closely link fans with players and employees of sport organizations in exciting ways. Yet for all the positive connections they enable, we have also witnessed the ugliness that can occur when individuals hide behind a screen name. This ugliness was brought to the fore in the summer of 2016 by two prominent sports reporters, Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro. In a video that quickly went viral, men read tweets posted about Spain and DiCaro that highlighted the harassment and abuse they have experienced on Twitter. (To view the video, search YouTube for "#MoreThanMean." Warning: The content is disturbing.)Another troubling trend involves the use of social media to attack athletes (usually football players) when they are perceived to be responsible for a team's loss. Athletic departments, and coaches in particular, have been quick to respond to such attacks, but more work needs to be done on the issue - perhaps, for example, establishing a social media code of ethics for fans to follow.
In the Boardroom
The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics
Intercollegiate athletic programs - particularly Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) programs - face significant challenges, including the rising cost of maintaining competitive teams, pressure from stakeholders to win and keep winning, and the need to generate revenue to support their programs. These challenges can lead to ethical issues, including cheating (e.g., fake classes, improper tutoring assistance) geared to keeping athletes academically eligible. In this environment, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics seeks to influence policies to better support the academic experiences of student-athletes. The commission has produced reports and built an interactive database that stakeholders in college athletics can use to understand the current state of college sport and the spending it entails (Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, 2017). As a future employee in a sport organization, you can use resources provided by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and other groups (such as the College Sport Research Institute in Columbia, South Carolina) to stay informed about issues facing collegiate athletic administrators.
Case Study
Ethical Challenges in Youth Sport Administration
As fall arrives, you are excited to begin your first season as director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League. Though you look forward to watching the 30 teams play, you also recognize that some coaches and parents have exhibited conduct that does not support the principles of youth sport development, such as fun, fair play, and good sportspersonship. Unfortunately, it is not long into the season before you are approached by a group of disgruntled parents. They allege that the top team in the sixth-grade league (the Smithton Firecrackers) is violating the age requirement established by the league by allowing five players to play on their team who appear to be older and more mature than others in the league. The parents also complain that the coach of the Firecrackers (Coach Sarah) tends to use those five players for the majority of each game and that the scores are therefore lopsided. For example, one parent refers to a game in which her daughter's team lost 11-0 to the "more mature" Firecrackers. The parents also complain that Coach Sarah yells harshly at her players, even though you have received no complaints from parents of players on her team.
Case Study Questions
- Identify the ethical dilemmas presented in this fictional case study.
- Evaluate one of these dilemmas by using the etho-conventional decision-making model for sport managers.
- As director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League, what actions could you take to address the ethical dilemmas identified in question 1?
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Increased diversity brings change to sport organizations
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport.
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport. Depending on where you go, of course, the sport of choice may be hockey, basketball, cross-country skiing, or the world's most popular sport of soccer - but the general appeal of sport is experienced everywhere. Because sport is universal, participant and fan communities are bound to include diversity; therefore, organizations that want to support their participants and fans must reflect and engage those differences. One example can be found in ESPN, which recognizes the importance of diversity in fulfilling its mission: "To serve sports fans wherever sports are watched, listened to, discussed, debated, read about or played" (ESPN, "About," n.d., n.p.). To help it fulfill this mission, ESPN seeks to recruit, hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent the organization's globally diverse group of fans. To find out more about the importance of diversity in ESPN's employment practices, check out the organization's career website at https://jobs.espncareers.com.
As sport organizations continue to become more diverse, the ways in which they work also change. These changes relate to the shift to a more service-based economy in sport (Cunningham, 2015), which of course involves more direct interaction between employees and customers. Indeed, a service-based business succeeds only if it creates high-quality relationships between customers and employees. Researchers have noted that customers who believe they are interacting with people different from themselves experience less satisfaction in the interaction; therefore, building a workforce that reflects the different types of customers engaged by the organization may result in more positive customer service experiences (Cunningham, 2015).
In another ongoing change, both in the sport world and beyond, organizations increasingly use team-based approaches to tackle tasks and projects. In organizations that foster and support a diverse workforce, individuals who work in teams can interact with others who bring a wide variety of experiences, perspectives, and ideas. In this way, their differences can produce better work outcomes for the team and for the organization as a whole. Of course, as we discuss later in this chapter, working in a diverse group also comes with challenges. Therefore, the organization must provide support to help people overcome these challenges in order to make the most of diversity in a work team.
An additional consideration involves the increase in mergers and acquisitions in the sport industry, which sometimes involve global companies and can result in employees working with and for individuals from diverse backgrounds. In 2005, for instance, two of the largest sports apparel organizations merged when Adidas bought Reebok. Though both were international companies, Reebok was headquartered in the United States, whereas Adidas was based in Germany. Thus one of the initial challenges presented by the merger involved how to align the German organizational culture of engineering and design with the more marketing-focused organizational culture of a U.S. company. As this example suggests, the organizations that best support and foster an inclusive work environment enjoy an advantage in responding effectively to mergers and acquisitions. Furthermore, at the local level (e.g., towns, cities, regions), merging sport organizations may provide new and different perspectives on managing those organizations and better serve the needs of diverse customers (Cunningham, 2015).
Diversity in sport organizations can also be affected by legal mandates. In the United States, for instance, civil rights legislation mandates protection against discrimination based on race, gender, age, sex, physical ability, or religion; in addition, some state laws go further by protecting individuals from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The first major U.S. legislation of this type to address the workplace was Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. Later, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 added provisions allowing individuals to recover compensatory and punitive damages for intentional violations of Title VII by an employer (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2009). In another example, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 affords protection for underrepresented groups (e.g., women in sport organizations) and has been used to protect individuals in cases of discrimination, notably sexual harassment. In Canada, the Canadian Human Rights act extends legal protection for individuals regardless of "race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability, or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered" (Canadian Human Rights Act, 2017, n.p.).
Legal mandates notwithstanding, sport organizations that lack a diverse workforce often face ethical challenges, most notably at the senior level (i.e., in the leadership team). One high-profile example can be found in the NFL's struggle to formulate even a barely adequate response to the issue of domestic violence committed by players. In response, calls continue to be made for the league to increase the diversity of its senior leadership - specifically, by including more women - to help it respond more effectively to this issue (Brinson, 2014).
More generally, social pressures have contributed to increased awareness of the need for a diverse workforce in sport organizations (Cunningham, 2015). In this vein, scholar and advocate Richard Lapchick (2016) and his colleagues collect extensive data regarding the racial and gender demographics of employees working in U.S.-based intercollegiate sport organizations and in major professional sport organizations in the United States and beyond. Lapchick and other sport management scholars - including Fink (2016), LaVoi (2016), Burton (2015), Cunningham (2015), and Walker and Melton (2015) - continue to call for an increase in diverse representation in senior leadership positions across sport organizations. The importance of diversity has also been voiced by external stakeholders, such as customers and prospective employees. For example, prospective employees have expressed more positive attitudes toward sport organizations that they believed were more diverse and maintained a more inclusive organizational culture (W. Lee & Cunningham, 2015).
In the Boardroom
Diversity, Inclusion, and Wellness at ESPN
The ESPN Diversity, Inclusion & Wellness team "strives to hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent . . . [the organization's] diverse global fans" (ESPN, "Diversity," n.d., n.p.). ESPN maintains several employee resource groups (ERGs) that are each led by employees and assigned a member of the executive team who serves as a champion for the group. Including more than 2,000 members overall, the ERGs provide a way for employees to connect based on shared interests or backgrounds. Examples include Young Professionals, Women, Asians, People With Disabilities, Latinos, Families, African Americans, and ESPN EQUAL (for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees). The collective mission of the ERGs is to do the following (ESPN, "Diversity"):
- Educate and promote cultural diversity
- Network and learn from others
- Develop professional skill sets
- Add value to the business
- Expand the recruitment base
- Support ESPN's community and diversity outreach partnerships
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Importance of organizational behavior in sport
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders.
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders. In every sector of the sport industry - from grassroots club sport to the high-performance sector - the people who run and contribute to sport organizations are crucial to each organization's daily challenges, trials and tribulations, and, ultimately, success or failure.
The field of organizational behavior (OB) involves the scientific study of individual behavior, group dynamics, and structural choices in organizations (Nelson, Quick, Armstrong, & Condie, 2015). Put simply, OB researchers study people, what they think of and do in their jobs and in their groups, and, more generally, how an organization operates and performs. Such researchers find a wide array of opportunities to examine organizational behavior in the sport industry. For instance, employed work may be performed on either a part-time or a full-time basis in either the amateur or the professional sport industry.
Furthermore, both part-time and full-time work can be done in either an enduring or a temporary organization. Enduring organizations (e.g., the National Hockey League's Montreal Canadiens) have a long and storied history, whereas temporary organizations (e.g., an organizing committee for a sport event - for instance, the 2018 Commonwealth Games) exist for a defined and relatively short period of time. Temporary sport organizations typically rely more heavily on volunteers, particularly at higher levels of performance (e.g., the Olympics) and in the amateur sector both nationally and locally (e.g., Canada Games, club-based sport competitions). Of course, volunteers are also invaluable to enduring organizations, where they support various initiatives, such as community fundraising campaigns. At the amateur level, however, many organizations lack the budget to hire paid staff and therefore rely largely on unpaid volunteers for their success and even for their survival.
The work performed in the sport industry engages many stakeholders, who are also part of what makes sport operations both attractive and specialized. Full-time employees, sport volunteers, athletes, coaches, trainers, administrative support staffers - all of these people have various levels of attachment to their work and to their sport organizations. For instance, the factors that motivate full-time employees to excel at their jobs and advance in their companies are likely to differ from the factors that motivate individuals to volunteer their time without any particular expected return on investment. Differences also exist in their attitudes toward work and their behavior in group and organizational settings. Sport organizations are also distinguished by the variety of actors who may hold relevant technical expertise - sometimes with very different skill sets - such as coaches, players, and administrators.
As sport management began to emerge as a field of study in classrooms across the United States and Canada in the 1980s, scholars borrowed from parent disciplines - such as sport psychology, sociology, and business administration - in order to learn more about the factors that make working in and for sport organizations unique (e.g., transformational leadership in sport administration or coaching, marketing segmentation for sport organizations, the marketing of and through sport). Sport management scholars also began organizing conferences, both in North America (e.g., North American Society for Sport Management, n.d.) and abroad in order to discuss the field and its future. In these formative years of sport management scholarship, the study of people's organizational behavior often concentrated on coaches and administrators. As the field matured, research also addressed other stakeholder issues (e.g., volunteers, gender, ethics, race), marketing literature was further developed, and the study of human resource management in sport organizations emerged.
Thus the study of people in sport organizations was garnering more interest. This growth resulted in part from the increased understanding of the importance of knowledge acquisition relative to the field of sport management and the realization that human capital is one of the most important resources in an organization, regardless of sector. This resource-based view, or RBV (see Barney, 1991), posited that firms are more likely to enjoy sustained advantages if they control resources that are not substitutable and are valuable, rare, and imperfectly imitable. The RBV approach has helped sport management researchers determine the ways in which sport is unique and the ways in which it is similar to other industries.
Acquiring and developing both tangible and intangible resources is crucial to the successful management of an organization. This process requires us to appreciate both the external environment and the internal context of the organization. External forces acting on the organization include economic, political, sociocultural, legal, ecological, demographic, and technological factors. In this competitive global ecosystem, "knowledge and human capital have become essential strategic resources . . . , [and] the process of fostering their creation and deployment has emerged as one of the most important areas of strategic management" (Szymanksi & Wolfe, 2017, p. 26). In these days of fierce competition and rapid change, it is critical that management scholars recognize and understand that attracting, developing, and retaining human talent is a prerequisite for success.
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Future challenges in ethical operations of sport organizations
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead.
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead. Therefore, we encourage you to contemplate other ongoing ethical challenges, as well as those that may yet arise.
Intercollegiate sport will continue to face ethical challenges in both decision making and leadership due to ongoing pressure to win and increase revenue. Specifically, universities continue to rely on athletics as a marketing tool to increase student applications, increase enrollment of out-of-state students, enhance reputation, and, for a small percentage of universities, bring in considerable revenue. As a result, the pressure to win will continue to be felt by athletic directors, administrators, and coaches. At the same time, these individuals also face other pressures, such as fielding the most talented team possible within the academic requirements of the university and ensuring that student-athletes maintain their academic eligibility according to NCAA requirements. These competing pressures can lead to unethical decisions that carry negative implications for all of a university's stakeholders. To see how the desire to win can take precedence over all else, we need only to review the scandal related to alleged sexual assaults, other crimes, and cover-ups by members of the Baylor University football program under the leadership of then-coach Art Briles (Goodwyn, 2017).
On the professional level, both sport leaders and other stakeholders will continue to face the ethical challenge of how to address the growing crisis of traumatic brain injury in contact sports. The NFL and the NHL need to provide honest and ethical leadership that can serve as an example for those in youth sport and interscholastic and intercollegiate sport. Unfortunately, as of yet, league leaders have chosen to resist honest, significant reforms that would help support retired players who suffer from debilitating injuries as a result of head trauma sustained during their playing days (Lupica, 2016; Branch, 2016).
In addition, ethical challenges will continue to be created by technological developments that enable fast and easy sharing of information. Social media platforms (e.g., Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) can closely link fans with players and employees of sport organizations in exciting ways. Yet for all the positive connections they enable, we have also witnessed the ugliness that can occur when individuals hide behind a screen name. This ugliness was brought to the fore in the summer of 2016 by two prominent sports reporters, Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro. In a video that quickly went viral, men read tweets posted about Spain and DiCaro that highlighted the harassment and abuse they have experienced on Twitter. (To view the video, search YouTube for "#MoreThanMean." Warning: The content is disturbing.)Another troubling trend involves the use of social media to attack athletes (usually football players) when they are perceived to be responsible for a team's loss. Athletic departments, and coaches in particular, have been quick to respond to such attacks, but more work needs to be done on the issue - perhaps, for example, establishing a social media code of ethics for fans to follow.
In the Boardroom
The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics
Intercollegiate athletic programs - particularly Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) programs - face significant challenges, including the rising cost of maintaining competitive teams, pressure from stakeholders to win and keep winning, and the need to generate revenue to support their programs. These challenges can lead to ethical issues, including cheating (e.g., fake classes, improper tutoring assistance) geared to keeping athletes academically eligible. In this environment, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics seeks to influence policies to better support the academic experiences of student-athletes. The commission has produced reports and built an interactive database that stakeholders in college athletics can use to understand the current state of college sport and the spending it entails (Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, 2017). As a future employee in a sport organization, you can use resources provided by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and other groups (such as the College Sport Research Institute in Columbia, South Carolina) to stay informed about issues facing collegiate athletic administrators.
Case Study
Ethical Challenges in Youth Sport Administration
As fall arrives, you are excited to begin your first season as director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League. Though you look forward to watching the 30 teams play, you also recognize that some coaches and parents have exhibited conduct that does not support the principles of youth sport development, such as fun, fair play, and good sportspersonship. Unfortunately, it is not long into the season before you are approached by a group of disgruntled parents. They allege that the top team in the sixth-grade league (the Smithton Firecrackers) is violating the age requirement established by the league by allowing five players to play on their team who appear to be older and more mature than others in the league. The parents also complain that the coach of the Firecrackers (Coach Sarah) tends to use those five players for the majority of each game and that the scores are therefore lopsided. For example, one parent refers to a game in which her daughter's team lost 11-0 to the "more mature" Firecrackers. The parents also complain that Coach Sarah yells harshly at her players, even though you have received no complaints from parents of players on her team.
Case Study Questions
- Identify the ethical dilemmas presented in this fictional case study.
- Evaluate one of these dilemmas by using the etho-conventional decision-making model for sport managers.
- As director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League, what actions could you take to address the ethical dilemmas identified in question 1?
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Increased diversity brings change to sport organizations
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport.
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport. Depending on where you go, of course, the sport of choice may be hockey, basketball, cross-country skiing, or the world's most popular sport of soccer - but the general appeal of sport is experienced everywhere. Because sport is universal, participant and fan communities are bound to include diversity; therefore, organizations that want to support their participants and fans must reflect and engage those differences. One example can be found in ESPN, which recognizes the importance of diversity in fulfilling its mission: "To serve sports fans wherever sports are watched, listened to, discussed, debated, read about or played" (ESPN, "About," n.d., n.p.). To help it fulfill this mission, ESPN seeks to recruit, hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent the organization's globally diverse group of fans. To find out more about the importance of diversity in ESPN's employment practices, check out the organization's career website at https://jobs.espncareers.com.
As sport organizations continue to become more diverse, the ways in which they work also change. These changes relate to the shift to a more service-based economy in sport (Cunningham, 2015), which of course involves more direct interaction between employees and customers. Indeed, a service-based business succeeds only if it creates high-quality relationships between customers and employees. Researchers have noted that customers who believe they are interacting with people different from themselves experience less satisfaction in the interaction; therefore, building a workforce that reflects the different types of customers engaged by the organization may result in more positive customer service experiences (Cunningham, 2015).
In another ongoing change, both in the sport world and beyond, organizations increasingly use team-based approaches to tackle tasks and projects. In organizations that foster and support a diverse workforce, individuals who work in teams can interact with others who bring a wide variety of experiences, perspectives, and ideas. In this way, their differences can produce better work outcomes for the team and for the organization as a whole. Of course, as we discuss later in this chapter, working in a diverse group also comes with challenges. Therefore, the organization must provide support to help people overcome these challenges in order to make the most of diversity in a work team.
An additional consideration involves the increase in mergers and acquisitions in the sport industry, which sometimes involve global companies and can result in employees working with and for individuals from diverse backgrounds. In 2005, for instance, two of the largest sports apparel organizations merged when Adidas bought Reebok. Though both were international companies, Reebok was headquartered in the United States, whereas Adidas was based in Germany. Thus one of the initial challenges presented by the merger involved how to align the German organizational culture of engineering and design with the more marketing-focused organizational culture of a U.S. company. As this example suggests, the organizations that best support and foster an inclusive work environment enjoy an advantage in responding effectively to mergers and acquisitions. Furthermore, at the local level (e.g., towns, cities, regions), merging sport organizations may provide new and different perspectives on managing those organizations and better serve the needs of diverse customers (Cunningham, 2015).
Diversity in sport organizations can also be affected by legal mandates. In the United States, for instance, civil rights legislation mandates protection against discrimination based on race, gender, age, sex, physical ability, or religion; in addition, some state laws go further by protecting individuals from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The first major U.S. legislation of this type to address the workplace was Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. Later, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 added provisions allowing individuals to recover compensatory and punitive damages for intentional violations of Title VII by an employer (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2009). In another example, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 affords protection for underrepresented groups (e.g., women in sport organizations) and has been used to protect individuals in cases of discrimination, notably sexual harassment. In Canada, the Canadian Human Rights act extends legal protection for individuals regardless of "race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability, or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered" (Canadian Human Rights Act, 2017, n.p.).
Legal mandates notwithstanding, sport organizations that lack a diverse workforce often face ethical challenges, most notably at the senior level (i.e., in the leadership team). One high-profile example can be found in the NFL's struggle to formulate even a barely adequate response to the issue of domestic violence committed by players. In response, calls continue to be made for the league to increase the diversity of its senior leadership - specifically, by including more women - to help it respond more effectively to this issue (Brinson, 2014).
More generally, social pressures have contributed to increased awareness of the need for a diverse workforce in sport organizations (Cunningham, 2015). In this vein, scholar and advocate Richard Lapchick (2016) and his colleagues collect extensive data regarding the racial and gender demographics of employees working in U.S.-based intercollegiate sport organizations and in major professional sport organizations in the United States and beyond. Lapchick and other sport management scholars - including Fink (2016), LaVoi (2016), Burton (2015), Cunningham (2015), and Walker and Melton (2015) - continue to call for an increase in diverse representation in senior leadership positions across sport organizations. The importance of diversity has also been voiced by external stakeholders, such as customers and prospective employees. For example, prospective employees have expressed more positive attitudes toward sport organizations that they believed were more diverse and maintained a more inclusive organizational culture (W. Lee & Cunningham, 2015).
In the Boardroom
Diversity, Inclusion, and Wellness at ESPN
The ESPN Diversity, Inclusion & Wellness team "strives to hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent . . . [the organization's] diverse global fans" (ESPN, "Diversity," n.d., n.p.). ESPN maintains several employee resource groups (ERGs) that are each led by employees and assigned a member of the executive team who serves as a champion for the group. Including more than 2,000 members overall, the ERGs provide a way for employees to connect based on shared interests or backgrounds. Examples include Young Professionals, Women, Asians, People With Disabilities, Latinos, Families, African Americans, and ESPN EQUAL (for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees). The collective mission of the ERGs is to do the following (ESPN, "Diversity"):
- Educate and promote cultural diversity
- Network and learn from others
- Develop professional skill sets
- Add value to the business
- Expand the recruitment base
- Support ESPN's community and diversity outreach partnerships
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Importance of organizational behavior in sport
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders.
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders. In every sector of the sport industry - from grassroots club sport to the high-performance sector - the people who run and contribute to sport organizations are crucial to each organization's daily challenges, trials and tribulations, and, ultimately, success or failure.
The field of organizational behavior (OB) involves the scientific study of individual behavior, group dynamics, and structural choices in organizations (Nelson, Quick, Armstrong, & Condie, 2015). Put simply, OB researchers study people, what they think of and do in their jobs and in their groups, and, more generally, how an organization operates and performs. Such researchers find a wide array of opportunities to examine organizational behavior in the sport industry. For instance, employed work may be performed on either a part-time or a full-time basis in either the amateur or the professional sport industry.
Furthermore, both part-time and full-time work can be done in either an enduring or a temporary organization. Enduring organizations (e.g., the National Hockey League's Montreal Canadiens) have a long and storied history, whereas temporary organizations (e.g., an organizing committee for a sport event - for instance, the 2018 Commonwealth Games) exist for a defined and relatively short period of time. Temporary sport organizations typically rely more heavily on volunteers, particularly at higher levels of performance (e.g., the Olympics) and in the amateur sector both nationally and locally (e.g., Canada Games, club-based sport competitions). Of course, volunteers are also invaluable to enduring organizations, where they support various initiatives, such as community fundraising campaigns. At the amateur level, however, many organizations lack the budget to hire paid staff and therefore rely largely on unpaid volunteers for their success and even for their survival.
The work performed in the sport industry engages many stakeholders, who are also part of what makes sport operations both attractive and specialized. Full-time employees, sport volunteers, athletes, coaches, trainers, administrative support staffers - all of these people have various levels of attachment to their work and to their sport organizations. For instance, the factors that motivate full-time employees to excel at their jobs and advance in their companies are likely to differ from the factors that motivate individuals to volunteer their time without any particular expected return on investment. Differences also exist in their attitudes toward work and their behavior in group and organizational settings. Sport organizations are also distinguished by the variety of actors who may hold relevant technical expertise - sometimes with very different skill sets - such as coaches, players, and administrators.
As sport management began to emerge as a field of study in classrooms across the United States and Canada in the 1980s, scholars borrowed from parent disciplines - such as sport psychology, sociology, and business administration - in order to learn more about the factors that make working in and for sport organizations unique (e.g., transformational leadership in sport administration or coaching, marketing segmentation for sport organizations, the marketing of and through sport). Sport management scholars also began organizing conferences, both in North America (e.g., North American Society for Sport Management, n.d.) and abroad in order to discuss the field and its future. In these formative years of sport management scholarship, the study of people's organizational behavior often concentrated on coaches and administrators. As the field matured, research also addressed other stakeholder issues (e.g., volunteers, gender, ethics, race), marketing literature was further developed, and the study of human resource management in sport organizations emerged.
Thus the study of people in sport organizations was garnering more interest. This growth resulted in part from the increased understanding of the importance of knowledge acquisition relative to the field of sport management and the realization that human capital is one of the most important resources in an organization, regardless of sector. This resource-based view, or RBV (see Barney, 1991), posited that firms are more likely to enjoy sustained advantages if they control resources that are not substitutable and are valuable, rare, and imperfectly imitable. The RBV approach has helped sport management researchers determine the ways in which sport is unique and the ways in which it is similar to other industries.
Acquiring and developing both tangible and intangible resources is crucial to the successful management of an organization. This process requires us to appreciate both the external environment and the internal context of the organization. External forces acting on the organization include economic, political, sociocultural, legal, ecological, demographic, and technological factors. In this competitive global ecosystem, "knowledge and human capital have become essential strategic resources . . . , [and] the process of fostering their creation and deployment has emerged as one of the most important areas of strategic management" (Szymanksi & Wolfe, 2017, p. 26). In these days of fierce competition and rapid change, it is critical that management scholars recognize and understand that attracting, developing, and retaining human talent is a prerequisite for success.
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Future challenges in ethical operations of sport organizations
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead.
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead. Therefore, we encourage you to contemplate other ongoing ethical challenges, as well as those that may yet arise.
Intercollegiate sport will continue to face ethical challenges in both decision making and leadership due to ongoing pressure to win and increase revenue. Specifically, universities continue to rely on athletics as a marketing tool to increase student applications, increase enrollment of out-of-state students, enhance reputation, and, for a small percentage of universities, bring in considerable revenue. As a result, the pressure to win will continue to be felt by athletic directors, administrators, and coaches. At the same time, these individuals also face other pressures, such as fielding the most talented team possible within the academic requirements of the university and ensuring that student-athletes maintain their academic eligibility according to NCAA requirements. These competing pressures can lead to unethical decisions that carry negative implications for all of a university's stakeholders. To see how the desire to win can take precedence over all else, we need only to review the scandal related to alleged sexual assaults, other crimes, and cover-ups by members of the Baylor University football program under the leadership of then-coach Art Briles (Goodwyn, 2017).
On the professional level, both sport leaders and other stakeholders will continue to face the ethical challenge of how to address the growing crisis of traumatic brain injury in contact sports. The NFL and the NHL need to provide honest and ethical leadership that can serve as an example for those in youth sport and interscholastic and intercollegiate sport. Unfortunately, as of yet, league leaders have chosen to resist honest, significant reforms that would help support retired players who suffer from debilitating injuries as a result of head trauma sustained during their playing days (Lupica, 2016; Branch, 2016).
In addition, ethical challenges will continue to be created by technological developments that enable fast and easy sharing of information. Social media platforms (e.g., Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) can closely link fans with players and employees of sport organizations in exciting ways. Yet for all the positive connections they enable, we have also witnessed the ugliness that can occur when individuals hide behind a screen name. This ugliness was brought to the fore in the summer of 2016 by two prominent sports reporters, Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro. In a video that quickly went viral, men read tweets posted about Spain and DiCaro that highlighted the harassment and abuse they have experienced on Twitter. (To view the video, search YouTube for "#MoreThanMean." Warning: The content is disturbing.)Another troubling trend involves the use of social media to attack athletes (usually football players) when they are perceived to be responsible for a team's loss. Athletic departments, and coaches in particular, have been quick to respond to such attacks, but more work needs to be done on the issue - perhaps, for example, establishing a social media code of ethics for fans to follow.
In the Boardroom
The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics
Intercollegiate athletic programs - particularly Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) programs - face significant challenges, including the rising cost of maintaining competitive teams, pressure from stakeholders to win and keep winning, and the need to generate revenue to support their programs. These challenges can lead to ethical issues, including cheating (e.g., fake classes, improper tutoring assistance) geared to keeping athletes academically eligible. In this environment, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics seeks to influence policies to better support the academic experiences of student-athletes. The commission has produced reports and built an interactive database that stakeholders in college athletics can use to understand the current state of college sport and the spending it entails (Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, 2017). As a future employee in a sport organization, you can use resources provided by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and other groups (such as the College Sport Research Institute in Columbia, South Carolina) to stay informed about issues facing collegiate athletic administrators.
Case Study
Ethical Challenges in Youth Sport Administration
As fall arrives, you are excited to begin your first season as director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League. Though you look forward to watching the 30 teams play, you also recognize that some coaches and parents have exhibited conduct that does not support the principles of youth sport development, such as fun, fair play, and good sportspersonship. Unfortunately, it is not long into the season before you are approached by a group of disgruntled parents. They allege that the top team in the sixth-grade league (the Smithton Firecrackers) is violating the age requirement established by the league by allowing five players to play on their team who appear to be older and more mature than others in the league. The parents also complain that the coach of the Firecrackers (Coach Sarah) tends to use those five players for the majority of each game and that the scores are therefore lopsided. For example, one parent refers to a game in which her daughter's team lost 11-0 to the "more mature" Firecrackers. The parents also complain that Coach Sarah yells harshly at her players, even though you have received no complaints from parents of players on her team.
Case Study Questions
- Identify the ethical dilemmas presented in this fictional case study.
- Evaluate one of these dilemmas by using the etho-conventional decision-making model for sport managers.
- As director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League, what actions could you take to address the ethical dilemmas identified in question 1?
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Increased diversity brings change to sport organizations
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport.
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport. Depending on where you go, of course, the sport of choice may be hockey, basketball, cross-country skiing, or the world's most popular sport of soccer - but the general appeal of sport is experienced everywhere. Because sport is universal, participant and fan communities are bound to include diversity; therefore, organizations that want to support their participants and fans must reflect and engage those differences. One example can be found in ESPN, which recognizes the importance of diversity in fulfilling its mission: "To serve sports fans wherever sports are watched, listened to, discussed, debated, read about or played" (ESPN, "About," n.d., n.p.). To help it fulfill this mission, ESPN seeks to recruit, hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent the organization's globally diverse group of fans. To find out more about the importance of diversity in ESPN's employment practices, check out the organization's career website at https://jobs.espncareers.com.
As sport organizations continue to become more diverse, the ways in which they work also change. These changes relate to the shift to a more service-based economy in sport (Cunningham, 2015), which of course involves more direct interaction between employees and customers. Indeed, a service-based business succeeds only if it creates high-quality relationships between customers and employees. Researchers have noted that customers who believe they are interacting with people different from themselves experience less satisfaction in the interaction; therefore, building a workforce that reflects the different types of customers engaged by the organization may result in more positive customer service experiences (Cunningham, 2015).
In another ongoing change, both in the sport world and beyond, organizations increasingly use team-based approaches to tackle tasks and projects. In organizations that foster and support a diverse workforce, individuals who work in teams can interact with others who bring a wide variety of experiences, perspectives, and ideas. In this way, their differences can produce better work outcomes for the team and for the organization as a whole. Of course, as we discuss later in this chapter, working in a diverse group also comes with challenges. Therefore, the organization must provide support to help people overcome these challenges in order to make the most of diversity in a work team.
An additional consideration involves the increase in mergers and acquisitions in the sport industry, which sometimes involve global companies and can result in employees working with and for individuals from diverse backgrounds. In 2005, for instance, two of the largest sports apparel organizations merged when Adidas bought Reebok. Though both were international companies, Reebok was headquartered in the United States, whereas Adidas was based in Germany. Thus one of the initial challenges presented by the merger involved how to align the German organizational culture of engineering and design with the more marketing-focused organizational culture of a U.S. company. As this example suggests, the organizations that best support and foster an inclusive work environment enjoy an advantage in responding effectively to mergers and acquisitions. Furthermore, at the local level (e.g., towns, cities, regions), merging sport organizations may provide new and different perspectives on managing those organizations and better serve the needs of diverse customers (Cunningham, 2015).
Diversity in sport organizations can also be affected by legal mandates. In the United States, for instance, civil rights legislation mandates protection against discrimination based on race, gender, age, sex, physical ability, or religion; in addition, some state laws go further by protecting individuals from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The first major U.S. legislation of this type to address the workplace was Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. Later, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 added provisions allowing individuals to recover compensatory and punitive damages for intentional violations of Title VII by an employer (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2009). In another example, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 affords protection for underrepresented groups (e.g., women in sport organizations) and has been used to protect individuals in cases of discrimination, notably sexual harassment. In Canada, the Canadian Human Rights act extends legal protection for individuals regardless of "race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability, or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered" (Canadian Human Rights Act, 2017, n.p.).
Legal mandates notwithstanding, sport organizations that lack a diverse workforce often face ethical challenges, most notably at the senior level (i.e., in the leadership team). One high-profile example can be found in the NFL's struggle to formulate even a barely adequate response to the issue of domestic violence committed by players. In response, calls continue to be made for the league to increase the diversity of its senior leadership - specifically, by including more women - to help it respond more effectively to this issue (Brinson, 2014).
More generally, social pressures have contributed to increased awareness of the need for a diverse workforce in sport organizations (Cunningham, 2015). In this vein, scholar and advocate Richard Lapchick (2016) and his colleagues collect extensive data regarding the racial and gender demographics of employees working in U.S.-based intercollegiate sport organizations and in major professional sport organizations in the United States and beyond. Lapchick and other sport management scholars - including Fink (2016), LaVoi (2016), Burton (2015), Cunningham (2015), and Walker and Melton (2015) - continue to call for an increase in diverse representation in senior leadership positions across sport organizations. The importance of diversity has also been voiced by external stakeholders, such as customers and prospective employees. For example, prospective employees have expressed more positive attitudes toward sport organizations that they believed were more diverse and maintained a more inclusive organizational culture (W. Lee & Cunningham, 2015).
In the Boardroom
Diversity, Inclusion, and Wellness at ESPN
The ESPN Diversity, Inclusion & Wellness team "strives to hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent . . . [the organization's] diverse global fans" (ESPN, "Diversity," n.d., n.p.). ESPN maintains several employee resource groups (ERGs) that are each led by employees and assigned a member of the executive team who serves as a champion for the group. Including more than 2,000 members overall, the ERGs provide a way for employees to connect based on shared interests or backgrounds. Examples include Young Professionals, Women, Asians, People With Disabilities, Latinos, Families, African Americans, and ESPN EQUAL (for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees). The collective mission of the ERGs is to do the following (ESPN, "Diversity"):
- Educate and promote cultural diversity
- Network and learn from others
- Develop professional skill sets
- Add value to the business
- Expand the recruitment base
- Support ESPN's community and diversity outreach partnerships
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Importance of organizational behavior in sport
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders.
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders. In every sector of the sport industry - from grassroots club sport to the high-performance sector - the people who run and contribute to sport organizations are crucial to each organization's daily challenges, trials and tribulations, and, ultimately, success or failure.
The field of organizational behavior (OB) involves the scientific study of individual behavior, group dynamics, and structural choices in organizations (Nelson, Quick, Armstrong, & Condie, 2015). Put simply, OB researchers study people, what they think of and do in their jobs and in their groups, and, more generally, how an organization operates and performs. Such researchers find a wide array of opportunities to examine organizational behavior in the sport industry. For instance, employed work may be performed on either a part-time or a full-time basis in either the amateur or the professional sport industry.
Furthermore, both part-time and full-time work can be done in either an enduring or a temporary organization. Enduring organizations (e.g., the National Hockey League's Montreal Canadiens) have a long and storied history, whereas temporary organizations (e.g., an organizing committee for a sport event - for instance, the 2018 Commonwealth Games) exist for a defined and relatively short period of time. Temporary sport organizations typically rely more heavily on volunteers, particularly at higher levels of performance (e.g., the Olympics) and in the amateur sector both nationally and locally (e.g., Canada Games, club-based sport competitions). Of course, volunteers are also invaluable to enduring organizations, where they support various initiatives, such as community fundraising campaigns. At the amateur level, however, many organizations lack the budget to hire paid staff and therefore rely largely on unpaid volunteers for their success and even for their survival.
The work performed in the sport industry engages many stakeholders, who are also part of what makes sport operations both attractive and specialized. Full-time employees, sport volunteers, athletes, coaches, trainers, administrative support staffers - all of these people have various levels of attachment to their work and to their sport organizations. For instance, the factors that motivate full-time employees to excel at their jobs and advance in their companies are likely to differ from the factors that motivate individuals to volunteer their time without any particular expected return on investment. Differences also exist in their attitudes toward work and their behavior in group and organizational settings. Sport organizations are also distinguished by the variety of actors who may hold relevant technical expertise - sometimes with very different skill sets - such as coaches, players, and administrators.
As sport management began to emerge as a field of study in classrooms across the United States and Canada in the 1980s, scholars borrowed from parent disciplines - such as sport psychology, sociology, and business administration - in order to learn more about the factors that make working in and for sport organizations unique (e.g., transformational leadership in sport administration or coaching, marketing segmentation for sport organizations, the marketing of and through sport). Sport management scholars also began organizing conferences, both in North America (e.g., North American Society for Sport Management, n.d.) and abroad in order to discuss the field and its future. In these formative years of sport management scholarship, the study of people's organizational behavior often concentrated on coaches and administrators. As the field matured, research also addressed other stakeholder issues (e.g., volunteers, gender, ethics, race), marketing literature was further developed, and the study of human resource management in sport organizations emerged.
Thus the study of people in sport organizations was garnering more interest. This growth resulted in part from the increased understanding of the importance of knowledge acquisition relative to the field of sport management and the realization that human capital is one of the most important resources in an organization, regardless of sector. This resource-based view, or RBV (see Barney, 1991), posited that firms are more likely to enjoy sustained advantages if they control resources that are not substitutable and are valuable, rare, and imperfectly imitable. The RBV approach has helped sport management researchers determine the ways in which sport is unique and the ways in which it is similar to other industries.
Acquiring and developing both tangible and intangible resources is crucial to the successful management of an organization. This process requires us to appreciate both the external environment and the internal context of the organization. External forces acting on the organization include economic, political, sociocultural, legal, ecological, demographic, and technological factors. In this competitive global ecosystem, "knowledge and human capital have become essential strategic resources . . . , [and] the process of fostering their creation and deployment has emerged as one of the most important areas of strategic management" (Szymanksi & Wolfe, 2017, p. 26). In these days of fierce competition and rapid change, it is critical that management scholars recognize and understand that attracting, developing, and retaining human talent is a prerequisite for success.
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Future challenges in ethical operations of sport organizations
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead.
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead. Therefore, we encourage you to contemplate other ongoing ethical challenges, as well as those that may yet arise.
Intercollegiate sport will continue to face ethical challenges in both decision making and leadership due to ongoing pressure to win and increase revenue. Specifically, universities continue to rely on athletics as a marketing tool to increase student applications, increase enrollment of out-of-state students, enhance reputation, and, for a small percentage of universities, bring in considerable revenue. As a result, the pressure to win will continue to be felt by athletic directors, administrators, and coaches. At the same time, these individuals also face other pressures, such as fielding the most talented team possible within the academic requirements of the university and ensuring that student-athletes maintain their academic eligibility according to NCAA requirements. These competing pressures can lead to unethical decisions that carry negative implications for all of a university's stakeholders. To see how the desire to win can take precedence over all else, we need only to review the scandal related to alleged sexual assaults, other crimes, and cover-ups by members of the Baylor University football program under the leadership of then-coach Art Briles (Goodwyn, 2017).
On the professional level, both sport leaders and other stakeholders will continue to face the ethical challenge of how to address the growing crisis of traumatic brain injury in contact sports. The NFL and the NHL need to provide honest and ethical leadership that can serve as an example for those in youth sport and interscholastic and intercollegiate sport. Unfortunately, as of yet, league leaders have chosen to resist honest, significant reforms that would help support retired players who suffer from debilitating injuries as a result of head trauma sustained during their playing days (Lupica, 2016; Branch, 2016).
In addition, ethical challenges will continue to be created by technological developments that enable fast and easy sharing of information. Social media platforms (e.g., Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) can closely link fans with players and employees of sport organizations in exciting ways. Yet for all the positive connections they enable, we have also witnessed the ugliness that can occur when individuals hide behind a screen name. This ugliness was brought to the fore in the summer of 2016 by two prominent sports reporters, Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro. In a video that quickly went viral, men read tweets posted about Spain and DiCaro that highlighted the harassment and abuse they have experienced on Twitter. (To view the video, search YouTube for "#MoreThanMean." Warning: The content is disturbing.)Another troubling trend involves the use of social media to attack athletes (usually football players) when they are perceived to be responsible for a team's loss. Athletic departments, and coaches in particular, have been quick to respond to such attacks, but more work needs to be done on the issue - perhaps, for example, establishing a social media code of ethics for fans to follow.
In the Boardroom
The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics
Intercollegiate athletic programs - particularly Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) programs - face significant challenges, including the rising cost of maintaining competitive teams, pressure from stakeholders to win and keep winning, and the need to generate revenue to support their programs. These challenges can lead to ethical issues, including cheating (e.g., fake classes, improper tutoring assistance) geared to keeping athletes academically eligible. In this environment, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics seeks to influence policies to better support the academic experiences of student-athletes. The commission has produced reports and built an interactive database that stakeholders in college athletics can use to understand the current state of college sport and the spending it entails (Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, 2017). As a future employee in a sport organization, you can use resources provided by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and other groups (such as the College Sport Research Institute in Columbia, South Carolina) to stay informed about issues facing collegiate athletic administrators.
Case Study
Ethical Challenges in Youth Sport Administration
As fall arrives, you are excited to begin your first season as director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League. Though you look forward to watching the 30 teams play, you also recognize that some coaches and parents have exhibited conduct that does not support the principles of youth sport development, such as fun, fair play, and good sportspersonship. Unfortunately, it is not long into the season before you are approached by a group of disgruntled parents. They allege that the top team in the sixth-grade league (the Smithton Firecrackers) is violating the age requirement established by the league by allowing five players to play on their team who appear to be older and more mature than others in the league. The parents also complain that the coach of the Firecrackers (Coach Sarah) tends to use those five players for the majority of each game and that the scores are therefore lopsided. For example, one parent refers to a game in which her daughter's team lost 11-0 to the "more mature" Firecrackers. The parents also complain that Coach Sarah yells harshly at her players, even though you have received no complaints from parents of players on her team.
Case Study Questions
- Identify the ethical dilemmas presented in this fictional case study.
- Evaluate one of these dilemmas by using the etho-conventional decision-making model for sport managers.
- As director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League, what actions could you take to address the ethical dilemmas identified in question 1?
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Increased diversity brings change to sport organizations
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport.
One of the most amazing things about working in sport is that it is universal - you can travel to any area of the world and interact with people who play, watch, and love to talk about sport. Depending on where you go, of course, the sport of choice may be hockey, basketball, cross-country skiing, or the world's most popular sport of soccer - but the general appeal of sport is experienced everywhere. Because sport is universal, participant and fan communities are bound to include diversity; therefore, organizations that want to support their participants and fans must reflect and engage those differences. One example can be found in ESPN, which recognizes the importance of diversity in fulfilling its mission: "To serve sports fans wherever sports are watched, listened to, discussed, debated, read about or played" (ESPN, "About," n.d., n.p.). To help it fulfill this mission, ESPN seeks to recruit, hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent the organization's globally diverse group of fans. To find out more about the importance of diversity in ESPN's employment practices, check out the organization's career website at https://jobs.espncareers.com.
As sport organizations continue to become more diverse, the ways in which they work also change. These changes relate to the shift to a more service-based economy in sport (Cunningham, 2015), which of course involves more direct interaction between employees and customers. Indeed, a service-based business succeeds only if it creates high-quality relationships between customers and employees. Researchers have noted that customers who believe they are interacting with people different from themselves experience less satisfaction in the interaction; therefore, building a workforce that reflects the different types of customers engaged by the organization may result in more positive customer service experiences (Cunningham, 2015).
In another ongoing change, both in the sport world and beyond, organizations increasingly use team-based approaches to tackle tasks and projects. In organizations that foster and support a diverse workforce, individuals who work in teams can interact with others who bring a wide variety of experiences, perspectives, and ideas. In this way, their differences can produce better work outcomes for the team and for the organization as a whole. Of course, as we discuss later in this chapter, working in a diverse group also comes with challenges. Therefore, the organization must provide support to help people overcome these challenges in order to make the most of diversity in a work team.
An additional consideration involves the increase in mergers and acquisitions in the sport industry, which sometimes involve global companies and can result in employees working with and for individuals from diverse backgrounds. In 2005, for instance, two of the largest sports apparel organizations merged when Adidas bought Reebok. Though both were international companies, Reebok was headquartered in the United States, whereas Adidas was based in Germany. Thus one of the initial challenges presented by the merger involved how to align the German organizational culture of engineering and design with the more marketing-focused organizational culture of a U.S. company. As this example suggests, the organizations that best support and foster an inclusive work environment enjoy an advantage in responding effectively to mergers and acquisitions. Furthermore, at the local level (e.g., towns, cities, regions), merging sport organizations may provide new and different perspectives on managing those organizations and better serve the needs of diverse customers (Cunningham, 2015).
Diversity in sport organizations can also be affected by legal mandates. In the United States, for instance, civil rights legislation mandates protection against discrimination based on race, gender, age, sex, physical ability, or religion; in addition, some state laws go further by protecting individuals from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The first major U.S. legislation of this type to address the workplace was Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. Later, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 added provisions allowing individuals to recover compensatory and punitive damages for intentional violations of Title VII by an employer (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2009). In another example, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 affords protection for underrepresented groups (e.g., women in sport organizations) and has been used to protect individuals in cases of discrimination, notably sexual harassment. In Canada, the Canadian Human Rights act extends legal protection for individuals regardless of "race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability, or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered" (Canadian Human Rights Act, 2017, n.p.).
Legal mandates notwithstanding, sport organizations that lack a diverse workforce often face ethical challenges, most notably at the senior level (i.e., in the leadership team). One high-profile example can be found in the NFL's struggle to formulate even a barely adequate response to the issue of domestic violence committed by players. In response, calls continue to be made for the league to increase the diversity of its senior leadership - specifically, by including more women - to help it respond more effectively to this issue (Brinson, 2014).
More generally, social pressures have contributed to increased awareness of the need for a diverse workforce in sport organizations (Cunningham, 2015). In this vein, scholar and advocate Richard Lapchick (2016) and his colleagues collect extensive data regarding the racial and gender demographics of employees working in U.S.-based intercollegiate sport organizations and in major professional sport organizations in the United States and beyond. Lapchick and other sport management scholars - including Fink (2016), LaVoi (2016), Burton (2015), Cunningham (2015), and Walker and Melton (2015) - continue to call for an increase in diverse representation in senior leadership positions across sport organizations. The importance of diversity has also been voiced by external stakeholders, such as customers and prospective employees. For example, prospective employees have expressed more positive attitudes toward sport organizations that they believed were more diverse and maintained a more inclusive organizational culture (W. Lee & Cunningham, 2015).
In the Boardroom
Diversity, Inclusion, and Wellness at ESPN
The ESPN Diversity, Inclusion & Wellness team "strives to hire, develop, and retain talented people who represent . . . [the organization's] diverse global fans" (ESPN, "Diversity," n.d., n.p.). ESPN maintains several employee resource groups (ERGs) that are each led by employees and assigned a member of the executive team who serves as a champion for the group. Including more than 2,000 members overall, the ERGs provide a way for employees to connect based on shared interests or backgrounds. Examples include Young Professionals, Women, Asians, People With Disabilities, Latinos, Families, African Americans, and ESPN EQUAL (for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees). The collective mission of the ERGs is to do the following (ESPN, "Diversity"):
- Educate and promote cultural diversity
- Network and learn from others
- Develop professional skill sets
- Add value to the business
- Expand the recruitment base
- Support ESPN's community and diversity outreach partnerships
Learn more about Organizational Behavior in Sport Management.
Importance of organizational behavior in sport
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders.
Business is conducted by people, for people, and through people. Even today, when technology plays an increased and critical role in our lives, a sport organization cannot exist without the people who conceive it in the first place and those who work toward accomplishing its mission, vision, and objectives as set forth by its leaders. In every sector of the sport industry - from grassroots club sport to the high-performance sector - the people who run and contribute to sport organizations are crucial to each organization's daily challenges, trials and tribulations, and, ultimately, success or failure.
The field of organizational behavior (OB) involves the scientific study of individual behavior, group dynamics, and structural choices in organizations (Nelson, Quick, Armstrong, & Condie, 2015). Put simply, OB researchers study people, what they think of and do in their jobs and in their groups, and, more generally, how an organization operates and performs. Such researchers find a wide array of opportunities to examine organizational behavior in the sport industry. For instance, employed work may be performed on either a part-time or a full-time basis in either the amateur or the professional sport industry.
Furthermore, both part-time and full-time work can be done in either an enduring or a temporary organization. Enduring organizations (e.g., the National Hockey League's Montreal Canadiens) have a long and storied history, whereas temporary organizations (e.g., an organizing committee for a sport event - for instance, the 2018 Commonwealth Games) exist for a defined and relatively short period of time. Temporary sport organizations typically rely more heavily on volunteers, particularly at higher levels of performance (e.g., the Olympics) and in the amateur sector both nationally and locally (e.g., Canada Games, club-based sport competitions). Of course, volunteers are also invaluable to enduring organizations, where they support various initiatives, such as community fundraising campaigns. At the amateur level, however, many organizations lack the budget to hire paid staff and therefore rely largely on unpaid volunteers for their success and even for their survival.
The work performed in the sport industry engages many stakeholders, who are also part of what makes sport operations both attractive and specialized. Full-time employees, sport volunteers, athletes, coaches, trainers, administrative support staffers - all of these people have various levels of attachment to their work and to their sport organizations. For instance, the factors that motivate full-time employees to excel at their jobs and advance in their companies are likely to differ from the factors that motivate individuals to volunteer their time without any particular expected return on investment. Differences also exist in their attitudes toward work and their behavior in group and organizational settings. Sport organizations are also distinguished by the variety of actors who may hold relevant technical expertise - sometimes with very different skill sets - such as coaches, players, and administrators.
As sport management began to emerge as a field of study in classrooms across the United States and Canada in the 1980s, scholars borrowed from parent disciplines - such as sport psychology, sociology, and business administration - in order to learn more about the factors that make working in and for sport organizations unique (e.g., transformational leadership in sport administration or coaching, marketing segmentation for sport organizations, the marketing of and through sport). Sport management scholars also began organizing conferences, both in North America (e.g., North American Society for Sport Management, n.d.) and abroad in order to discuss the field and its future. In these formative years of sport management scholarship, the study of people's organizational behavior often concentrated on coaches and administrators. As the field matured, research also addressed other stakeholder issues (e.g., volunteers, gender, ethics, race), marketing literature was further developed, and the study of human resource management in sport organizations emerged.
Thus the study of people in sport organizations was garnering more interest. This growth resulted in part from the increased understanding of the importance of knowledge acquisition relative to the field of sport management and the realization that human capital is one of the most important resources in an organization, regardless of sector. This resource-based view, or RBV (see Barney, 1991), posited that firms are more likely to enjoy sustained advantages if they control resources that are not substitutable and are valuable, rare, and imperfectly imitable. The RBV approach has helped sport management researchers determine the ways in which sport is unique and the ways in which it is similar to other industries.
Acquiring and developing both tangible and intangible resources is crucial to the successful management of an organization. This process requires us to appreciate both the external environment and the internal context of the organization. External forces acting on the organization include economic, political, sociocultural, legal, ecological, demographic, and technological factors. In this competitive global ecosystem, "knowledge and human capital have become essential strategic resources . . . , [and] the process of fostering their creation and deployment has emerged as one of the most important areas of strategic management" (Szymanksi & Wolfe, 2017, p. 26). In these days of fierce competition and rapid change, it is critical that management scholars recognize and understand that attracting, developing, and retaining human talent is a prerequisite for success.
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Future challenges in ethical operations of sport organizations
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead.
Sport organizations will undoubtedly continue to face ethical challenges in the realm of organizational behavior. We discuss a few of those challenges here - in intercollegiate sport, professional sport, and technology in sport - but this discussion certainly does not provides an exhaustive consideration of what lies ahead. Therefore, we encourage you to contemplate other ongoing ethical challenges, as well as those that may yet arise.
Intercollegiate sport will continue to face ethical challenges in both decision making and leadership due to ongoing pressure to win and increase revenue. Specifically, universities continue to rely on athletics as a marketing tool to increase student applications, increase enrollment of out-of-state students, enhance reputation, and, for a small percentage of universities, bring in considerable revenue. As a result, the pressure to win will continue to be felt by athletic directors, administrators, and coaches. At the same time, these individuals also face other pressures, such as fielding the most talented team possible within the academic requirements of the university and ensuring that student-athletes maintain their academic eligibility according to NCAA requirements. These competing pressures can lead to unethical decisions that carry negative implications for all of a university's stakeholders. To see how the desire to win can take precedence over all else, we need only to review the scandal related to alleged sexual assaults, other crimes, and cover-ups by members of the Baylor University football program under the leadership of then-coach Art Briles (Goodwyn, 2017).
On the professional level, both sport leaders and other stakeholders will continue to face the ethical challenge of how to address the growing crisis of traumatic brain injury in contact sports. The NFL and the NHL need to provide honest and ethical leadership that can serve as an example for those in youth sport and interscholastic and intercollegiate sport. Unfortunately, as of yet, league leaders have chosen to resist honest, significant reforms that would help support retired players who suffer from debilitating injuries as a result of head trauma sustained during their playing days (Lupica, 2016; Branch, 2016).
In addition, ethical challenges will continue to be created by technological developments that enable fast and easy sharing of information. Social media platforms (e.g., Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) can closely link fans with players and employees of sport organizations in exciting ways. Yet for all the positive connections they enable, we have also witnessed the ugliness that can occur when individuals hide behind a screen name. This ugliness was brought to the fore in the summer of 2016 by two prominent sports reporters, Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro. In a video that quickly went viral, men read tweets posted about Spain and DiCaro that highlighted the harassment and abuse they have experienced on Twitter. (To view the video, search YouTube for "#MoreThanMean." Warning: The content is disturbing.)Another troubling trend involves the use of social media to attack athletes (usually football players) when they are perceived to be responsible for a team's loss. Athletic departments, and coaches in particular, have been quick to respond to such attacks, but more work needs to be done on the issue - perhaps, for example, establishing a social media code of ethics for fans to follow.
In the Boardroom
The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics
Intercollegiate athletic programs - particularly Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) programs - face significant challenges, including the rising cost of maintaining competitive teams, pressure from stakeholders to win and keep winning, and the need to generate revenue to support their programs. These challenges can lead to ethical issues, including cheating (e.g., fake classes, improper tutoring assistance) geared to keeping athletes academically eligible. In this environment, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics seeks to influence policies to better support the academic experiences of student-athletes. The commission has produced reports and built an interactive database that stakeholders in college athletics can use to understand the current state of college sport and the spending it entails (Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, 2017). As a future employee in a sport organization, you can use resources provided by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and other groups (such as the College Sport Research Institute in Columbia, South Carolina) to stay informed about issues facing collegiate athletic administrators.
Case Study
Ethical Challenges in Youth Sport Administration
As fall arrives, you are excited to begin your first season as director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League. Though you look forward to watching the 30 teams play, you also recognize that some coaches and parents have exhibited conduct that does not support the principles of youth sport development, such as fun, fair play, and good sportspersonship. Unfortunately, it is not long into the season before you are approached by a group of disgruntled parents. They allege that the top team in the sixth-grade league (the Smithton Firecrackers) is violating the age requirement established by the league by allowing five players to play on their team who appear to be older and more mature than others in the league. The parents also complain that the coach of the Firecrackers (Coach Sarah) tends to use those five players for the majority of each game and that the scores are therefore lopsided. For example, one parent refers to a game in which her daughter's team lost 11-0 to the "more mature" Firecrackers. The parents also complain that Coach Sarah yells harshly at her players, even though you have received no complaints from parents of players on her team.
Case Study Questions
- Identify the ethical dilemmas presented in this fictional case study.
- Evaluate one of these dilemmas by using the etho-conventional decision-making model for sport managers.
- As director of the Smithton Youth Soccer League, what actions could you take to address the ethical dilemmas identified in question 1?
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