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The content is presented from three broad perspectives: (1) Students will first learn the foundation of legal and managerial practices in sport governance, encompassing ethical behavior, effective leadership, decision making, and policy development within sport organizations. (2) Once the groundwork is established, a geographical framework explores the structures and functions of regulatory agencies for sport at the local, state, national, regional, and global levels. Students will gain an appreciation for how agencies vary, as well as the differences in for-profit, nonprofit, and quasi-public sport organizations at the various levels. (3) Students will examine the nuances of sport governance across selected sectors of the sport industry. Professional sport, amateur sport, sport media, sporting goods and licensing, and fitness, wellness, and health are presented alongside the emerging and rapidly evolving sectors of sport marketing, legalized sport wagering, and esports for a realistic look at how governance is applied across different sectors.
To enhance practical application, a related web resource presents 12 in-depth case studies and debates on relevant examples of governance in action within sports organizations. Each case study provides thought-provoking perspectives, authored by industry experts and scholars across sport business and academia. Students will gain real-world understanding of how governance varies across national and international levels by scrutinizing contemporary issues such as the NCAA college basketball corruption scandal, the NFL kneeling policy, Olympic host city selection, and poaching in esports. Critical thinking skills are encouraged with multiple-choice and discussion questions provided at the end of each case study.
Additional learning aids also help to connect foundational knowledge to modern-day application. Governance in Action boxes highlight key concepts and provide context in relationship to recent events. Critical thinking questions encourage classroom discussion, and end-of-chapter applied activities help to solidify understanding.
Providing an overview of managing sport at all levels and all sectors, Governance in Sport will help students develop an acute understanding of where power resides, how decisions are made, and the impact of those factors on the goals, purpose, and structure of sport organizations.
Note: The web resource is included with all new print books and some ebooks. For ebook formats that don’t provide access, the web resource is available separately.
Chapter 1. Legal Primer to Governance
Kelley Walton
Authority and Governance
Basic Legal Principles
Alternative Dispute Resolution
Sources of Law
International Perspective
Recap
Chapter 2. Ethics, Decision Making, and Leadership in Sport Organizations
Bonnie Tiell and Kelley Walton
Ethics
Decision Making
Leadership
Recap
Chapter 3. Board Governance and Policy Development in Sport Organizations
Bonnie Tiell
Best Practices in Board Governance
Policies and Procedures in Sport Organizations
Recap
Part II. Framework for Sport Governance
Chapter 4. State and Local Sport
Bonnie Tiell
Governance and Authority in Sport Organizations at the Local Level
Governance and Authority in Sport Organizations at the State Level
Challenges for Sport Governance at the Local and State Levels
Recap
Chapter 5. Regional and National Sport
Kerri Cebula and Bonnie Tiell
Defining and Classifying Regional and National Governing Sport Agencies
Regulatory Agencies for National and Regional Sport Participants (Athletes)
Regulatory Agencies for National and Regional Sports
Regulatory Agencies Governing National and Regional Sport Competition
Regulatory Agencies for National and Regional Sport Affiliates
Recap
Chapter 6. Global Sports
Bonnie Tiell
Defining a Global Sport Agency
Regulatory Agencies for International Multisport Competition
Regulatory Agencies for Athletes in International Sports
Regulatory Agencies Governing International and Global Sports
Regulatory Agencies in Global Sports With a Specialist Function
Recap
Part III. Governance and Authority in Sport Industry Sectors
Chapter 7. Professional Sports
Kerri Cebula
Team Sports
Individual Sports
Recap
Chapter 8. Amateur Sports
Kerri Cebula and Bonnie Tiell
Amateur Athletic Union
Youth Amateur Sports
Adult Amateur Sports
Intercollegiate Athletics
Recap
Chapter 9. Sport Medi
Galen Clavio and Matthew Zimmerman
Overview of Political Governance in Sport Media
Global and Commercial Governance in Sport Media
Partnerships Between Media and Sport Entities
Digital and Emerging Media in Sports
Sports Journalists
Recap
Chapter 10. Sporting Goods and Sport Licensing
Daniel A. Rascher and Mark S. Nagel
Size and Scope of the Sporting Goods Industry
Sport Licensing Landscape
Regulating and Policing the Industry
Future of the Industry
Recap
Chapter 11. Fitness, Wellness, and Health
Scott R. Jedlicka
Private Fitness and Health Clubs
Commercial Fitness and Health (For Profit)
Trainers: Certification and Licensure
Public Health
Nutritional Supplements
Recap
Chapter 12. Sport Marketing
Justin B. Kozubal, David W. Walsh, and Michael A. Odio
Marketing the Sport Product
Sport Marketing Organizations
Marketing Through Sport
Marketing Through Sport Mega-Events
Legal Issues in the Marketing Environment
Ambush Marketing
Recap
Chapter 13. Sport Wagering
Bonnie Tiell and Kerri Cebula
History of Sport Wagering in the United States
Status of Sport Wagering in the United States
Status of Sport Wagering Internationally
Regulatory Agencies for Sport Wagering
The Future of Sport Wagering
Recap
Chapter 14. Esports
Steve Borawski, Michael Kidd, and Bonnie Tiell
Esports Compared to Traditional Sport
History of Competitive Video Gaming
Esports Governing Agencies and Authorities
Areas of Esports Governance and Legislation
Recap
Case Study Abstracts
Bonnie Tiell, EdD, is a professor of sport management at Tiffin University (TU). She has served as the faculty’s NCAA athletic representative, dean of graduate studies, and MBA chair. Prior to her faculty appointment, she served as an administrator and an assistant athletic director. She is a member of the TU Hall of Fame in recognition of her extensive accolades for coaching volleyball, softball, and tennis.
Tiell also serves as a nonresident faculty member for the United States Sports Academy as an instructor in their doctoral program. She routinely travels abroad to instruct in the academy's international sport administration certificate programs. On behalf of the academy and select sport ministries, she has extensive experience working with executives, military leaders, elite coaches, and administrators representing international and national sport federations and associations.
Widely recognized for her contributions to intercollegiate athletic administration and global sport governance, Tiell is the founder and codirector of Academic Experience with Olympians, a program initiated in Athens, Greece, in 2004 that offers students from around the world the opportunity for on-site study of the organization, supervision, and management of international sport venues and elite competition in an Olympic host city. She is also cofounder of the Women’s Leadership Symposium in Intercollegiate Athletics, a program partially financed and now administrated by the NCAA and Women Leaders in College Sports.
Tiell holds a bachelor’s degree in physical education from Troy University, a master’s degree in sport administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a doctorate of education in sport management from the United States Sports Academy (USSA). She writes a monthly column for the Advertiser-Tribune that focuses on economic, global, and social issues in sport, and she is also the author of the textbook Human Resources in Sports: A Managerial Approach.
Kerri Cebula, JD, is an associate professor of sport management at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. She holds a juris doctorate from Marquette University Law School (MULS), where she also earned the certificate in sports law from the National Sports Law Institute (NSLI). While at MULS, she was a member of the Marquette Sports Law Review and served as a research assistant to Professor Paul Anderson, the director of the NSLI. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and justice from American University. She has presented at the conferences of the College Sport Research Institute, the Sport Marketing Association, the Sport and Recreation Law Association, and the European Association of Sport Management. She has been published in the Journal of Brand Strategy, Journal of NCAA Compliance, and Concussion Litigation Alert. Her work also appears in the Handbook of International Sport Business and Sports Leadership: A Concise Reference Guide.
Prior to coming to Kutztown, Kerri worked as a compliance officer in the athletic departments of Villanova University and the University of Delaware.
Digital and emerging media in sports
By Galen Clavio and Matthew Zimmerman
Sport media operate as a subset of the broader news and entertainment media, and that has been true in both traditional media and in digital and emerging media. As social networks emerged in the early part of the 21st century, sports played varying roles in the development of content and consumers. In some cases, sport media developed their own niches, and occasionally sport media acted as a leading audience attraction on certain media platforms.
The sport media industry is similar to other media sectors that are evolving from a physical domain to a digital economy, where consumers often create and publish their own content. This self-publishing landscape is filled with major challenges for governance issues related to illegal file sharing, piracy, and copyright infringement, whether intentional or accidental.
According to a Bloomberg report, there are over 20 million requests a week on Google web search engines to remove web links to copyright-protected material (Mola & Ovide, 2016). In 2016, a central repository noted complaints of copyright infringement applicable to over 1.5 billion websites (Mola & Ovide, 2016). According to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, companies are required to remove copyrighted material belonging to the rightful owner. When receiving notices of copyright violations, large Internet companies such as Facebook and YouTube often proceed to remove content without seeking permission from the person who published the material.
Due to the newness of digital and emerging media, traditional governance structures such as those found in broadcast and print ownership rules enforced by governments have not yet developed. Instead, the governance of these new media environments has been dictated by industry trends, audience affinities, and the suitability of certain technologies.
Net Neutrality
Complicating the sport media landscape even further has been the advent of high-speed Internet and mobile connectivity, the accompanying growth of social media, and online consumption of news and entertainment. While the World Wide Web was introduced in 1992, the importance of online sport media was minimal at best for the first 15 or so years following that date. Internet connections were slow, desktop-bound, and lacking infrastructure, since nearly all major aspects of sport media were still focused on traditional media channels such as printed newspapers, magazines, radio, and television.
However, the widespread growth of high-speed Internet in the early 2000s improved the quality and variety of available media content that consumers could access digitally. Instead of dial-up modem speeds restricting stories to words and an occasional photograph, high-speed Internet allowed for the transmission of data-rich media content such as audio and video.
By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, mobile devices had further enhanced the attractiveness of online sport media. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 (Silver, 2018) created a new world for sport media, one where pictures, sounds, and videos were not only digitally accessible, but portable. As sales of the iPhone and its competitor phones spiked over the next decade, digital sport media in all forms became increasingly important to consumers and media companies alike. Organizations asserted regulations such as blogging policies and social network guidelines to monitor the online behavior of employees (Linke & Zerfass, 2013).
During the 2010s, a policy debate developed concerning the way in which Internet service providers and cellular phone companies should be required to handle the transmission of data. The net neutrality conversation has confused a great many people, often because of deliberate misinformation spread by parties to the debate.
In simple terms, the concept of net neutrality is that all data should be treated equally on the Internet by Internet service providers (ISPs) and that companies should not be allowed to favor certain types of content, or content from certain providers, over content provided by others. Supporters of net neutrality argue that this equality of content has been a building block of the success of digital media over its first few decades of development, with consumers able to access data across platforms and content providers with ease. Internet service providers and major content providers, however, have argued that net neutrality stifles innovation and consumer choice (Geller, 2015).
Net neutrality affects sport media in important ways. Access to any digital sport media content is made through an ISP, either via a high-speed Internet subscription or through a mobile phone data plan. The absence of net neutrality creates the possibility that one of these data providers could choose to block or restrict access to another company's content because it rivals the content being provided by that data company or its business partners. Hypothetically, the lack of net neutrality protections could allow a company like Verizon as a mobile data provider to partner with the NFL and allow privileged status to streaming video from that entity, while throttling or restricting access by consumers to streaming video from other professional leagues.
The FCC's position on net neutrality became a highly partisan issue during the last half of the 2010s, with a Barack Obama administration-appointed FCC chairman designating the Internet as a public telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (Ruiz, 2015). Two years later, a Donald Trump administration-appointed FCC chairman moved to roll back those protections, with the repeal of those rules taking effect in 2018.
It is uncertain what the future holds for net neutrality, but it is worth noting that sport media entities continue to expand into the digital media space, with large organizations such as ESPN launching subscription streaming services containing access to wide swaths of content (Ha, 2019). As streaming services continue to expand, particular media and entertainment trends have become apparent. These market trends are described in table 9.4.
Esports and the Olympic Games
By Steve Borawski, Michael Kidd, and Bonnie Tiell
Governance in Action 14.2
An international federation is the cornerstone of global governance for traditional sports ranging from cycling, ice hockey, and softball to more obscure sports such as samba, lifesaving, and chess. The Global Association of International Sport Federations (GAISF) includes over 100 Olympic and non-Olympic sport federations, but entering 2020, there was no recognition of a federation for esports.
According to the Olympic Charter, without a universally recognized independent, nongovernmental international federation, esports is not eligible for consideration as an Olympic event. The IOC concluded that there was currently no organization representing esports globally that aligned with the Olympic movement, with officials citing fragmented governance, licensing issues, and inherent violence that were problematic (IOC News, 2018; Segerra, 2019). Despite the rhetoric precluding esports from becoming an Olympic sport in its current context, steps have been taken to set the stage for future inclusion.
For one, the International Esports Federation (IeSF), which works with 54 national esports federations around the world, has made formal applications and appeals with both the IOC and the GAISF for official recognition. In 2016, the federation received correspondence from the IOC outlining the evaluation process and next steps for esports to be considered as a recognized Olympic sport in the same manner as surfing, rock climbing, and other recent additions to the cadre of events (Polacek, 2016).
Despite the setback with the IeSF not being officially recognized, esports has been a topic at major international meetings, including the 2017 Olympic Summit (IOC News, 2017). The IOC and GAISF co-hosted an esports forum involving over 150 industry representatives, which led to the formation of an esports liaison group with a platform at the GAISF International Federations forum, the Associations of the National Olympic Committees General Assembly, and future IOC Olympic Summits (IOC News, 2018).
Possibly the greatest support for esports as a possible future Olympic event is its inclusion as a medal sport at the 2022 Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia. The Asian Games are a continental event recognized by the IOC. The Asian Electronic Sports Federation (AESF) is recognized by the Olympic Council of Asia, which governs the Asian Games.
While continental Games typically include nonmainstream sports that are germane to a geographic region (e.g., canoe polo and esports were a demonstration sport at the 2018 Asian Games), it is problematic to identify competitive gaming as a potential Olympic sport (“AESF Confirms,” 2018). However, discussions are emerging for inclusion of esports as an exhibition event, either at the 2024 Paris Olympics, likely in a restricted format, or through “virtual and connected” events preceding the Games and resembling online versions of existing sport such as sailing (Chao, 2017; Lanier, 2018; Morgan, 2019).
There is moderate anticipation that esports may one day be governed by a recognized international federation, whether it is the IeSF or another organization. In the meantime, there appear to be insurmountable hurdles to clear before esports would be considered a potential true Olympic sport.
What is leadership in sport organizations?
By Bonnie Tiell and Kelley Walton
Leadership Styles
Leadership style is the way leaders provide direction and motivate others. The styles proposed by Lewin, Lippet, and White (1939), Chelladurai (1978, 1984), and Goleman (2000) continue to resonate in the study of leadership and its application to the sports industry.
Classic Leadership Styles
Lewin et al. (1939) proposed that leaders demonstrate one of three styles of leadership: authoritarian, participative, or laissez-faire. These styles are generally used to describe the ways individuals lead, but as contingency theories suggest, a leader may select among the different styles for different audiences and situations.
The authoritarian, authoritative, or autocratic leader uses strong, directive actions to control the rules, regulations, activities, and relationships in the work environment. An autocratic leader often provides specific instructions or orders for achieving a task and rarely gives followers any authority in the choice of methods. The autocratic style has also been referred to as a militaristic or dictator style of leadership common to many elite Division I football and men's basketball coaches.
The participative style is exhibited by leaders who are considered fair and egalitarian and who involve others in decision making. Examples might include the sports professionals who serve as executives for national and global organizations (e.g., IOC, NCAA). The participative leadership style has also been described as a democratic style.
The laissez-faire or free-reign leadership style is exhibited by those who have little interaction with subordinates. As contingency leadership theories suggest, it is a style that may be most appropriate if a leader is supported by a competent and experienced staff in routine situations. For example, the executive director of a municipal recreation department with oversight for all summer camps may use a laissez-faire approach to supervise the youth sport director who has successfully organized the camp for the past seven years.
Multidimensional Leadership Style
Chelladurai (1978), a distinguished scholar in sport management, developed a multidimensional leadership model based on Lewin et al.'s three traditional styles. The model blends instructional behaviors (training), motivation tendencies, and two of Lewin's decision-making styles. The convergence of factors facilitates the choice of the best authoritative or participative leadership style based on the characteristics of the leader, situational characteristics, and the follower's “preferred” leadership behavior. Similar to the contingency theories on leadership, the result is a behavioral style that is best suited to the context of the situation. The multidimensional model suggests that effective leaders are those who can effectively modify their leadership style to meet the needs of the situation and the audience.
Contemporary Leadership Styles
Dan Goleman (2000), the authority on emotional and social intelligence, expanded on Lewin et al.'s model to develop six types of leadership styles: (1) coercive, (2) authoritative, (3) affiliative, (4) democratic, (5) pacesetting, and (6) coaching.
Goleman's approach to the field of leadership is postmodern and pragmatic. The researcher equates leadership styles with a set of golf clubs. Lower-handicap golfers instinctively know exactly which club to pull out in a given situation and are adept at using more than one (Goleman, 2000). Similarly, effective leaders with a governing role in sports can successfully employ a given style when necessary to obtain the desired results.
Goleman's work suggests the advantage to sport organizations of employing people who are strong in a particular leadership style that can compensate for deficiencies of the owner or other top authority. Table 2.5 provides a definition of each leadership style and an application of each to governing associations in the sport industry.
Digital and emerging media in sports
By Galen Clavio and Matthew Zimmerman
Sport media operate as a subset of the broader news and entertainment media, and that has been true in both traditional media and in digital and emerging media. As social networks emerged in the early part of the 21st century, sports played varying roles in the development of content and consumers. In some cases, sport media developed their own niches, and occasionally sport media acted as a leading audience attraction on certain media platforms.
The sport media industry is similar to other media sectors that are evolving from a physical domain to a digital economy, where consumers often create and publish their own content. This self-publishing landscape is filled with major challenges for governance issues related to illegal file sharing, piracy, and copyright infringement, whether intentional or accidental.
According to a Bloomberg report, there are over 20 million requests a week on Google web search engines to remove web links to copyright-protected material (Mola & Ovide, 2016). In 2016, a central repository noted complaints of copyright infringement applicable to over 1.5 billion websites (Mola & Ovide, 2016). According to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, companies are required to remove copyrighted material belonging to the rightful owner. When receiving notices of copyright violations, large Internet companies such as Facebook and YouTube often proceed to remove content without seeking permission from the person who published the material.
Due to the newness of digital and emerging media, traditional governance structures such as those found in broadcast and print ownership rules enforced by governments have not yet developed. Instead, the governance of these new media environments has been dictated by industry trends, audience affinities, and the suitability of certain technologies.
Net Neutrality
Complicating the sport media landscape even further has been the advent of high-speed Internet and mobile connectivity, the accompanying growth of social media, and online consumption of news and entertainment. While the World Wide Web was introduced in 1992, the importance of online sport media was minimal at best for the first 15 or so years following that date. Internet connections were slow, desktop-bound, and lacking infrastructure, since nearly all major aspects of sport media were still focused on traditional media channels such as printed newspapers, magazines, radio, and television.
However, the widespread growth of high-speed Internet in the early 2000s improved the quality and variety of available media content that consumers could access digitally. Instead of dial-up modem speeds restricting stories to words and an occasional photograph, high-speed Internet allowed for the transmission of data-rich media content such as audio and video.
By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, mobile devices had further enhanced the attractiveness of online sport media. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 (Silver, 2018) created a new world for sport media, one where pictures, sounds, and videos were not only digitally accessible, but portable. As sales of the iPhone and its competitor phones spiked over the next decade, digital sport media in all forms became increasingly important to consumers and media companies alike. Organizations asserted regulations such as blogging policies and social network guidelines to monitor the online behavior of employees (Linke & Zerfass, 2013).
During the 2010s, a policy debate developed concerning the way in which Internet service providers and cellular phone companies should be required to handle the transmission of data. The net neutrality conversation has confused a great many people, often because of deliberate misinformation spread by parties to the debate.
In simple terms, the concept of net neutrality is that all data should be treated equally on the Internet by Internet service providers (ISPs) and that companies should not be allowed to favor certain types of content, or content from certain providers, over content provided by others. Supporters of net neutrality argue that this equality of content has been a building block of the success of digital media over its first few decades of development, with consumers able to access data across platforms and content providers with ease. Internet service providers and major content providers, however, have argued that net neutrality stifles innovation and consumer choice (Geller, 2015).
Net neutrality affects sport media in important ways. Access to any digital sport media content is made through an ISP, either via a high-speed Internet subscription or through a mobile phone data plan. The absence of net neutrality creates the possibility that one of these data providers could choose to block or restrict access to another company's content because it rivals the content being provided by that data company or its business partners. Hypothetically, the lack of net neutrality protections could allow a company like Verizon as a mobile data provider to partner with the NFL and allow privileged status to streaming video from that entity, while throttling or restricting access by consumers to streaming video from other professional leagues.
The FCC's position on net neutrality became a highly partisan issue during the last half of the 2010s, with a Barack Obama administration-appointed FCC chairman designating the Internet as a public telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (Ruiz, 2015). Two years later, a Donald Trump administration-appointed FCC chairman moved to roll back those protections, with the repeal of those rules taking effect in 2018.
It is uncertain what the future holds for net neutrality, but it is worth noting that sport media entities continue to expand into the digital media space, with large organizations such as ESPN launching subscription streaming services containing access to wide swaths of content (Ha, 2019). As streaming services continue to expand, particular media and entertainment trends have become apparent. These market trends are described in table 9.4.
Esports and the Olympic Games
By Steve Borawski, Michael Kidd, and Bonnie Tiell
Governance in Action 14.2
An international federation is the cornerstone of global governance for traditional sports ranging from cycling, ice hockey, and softball to more obscure sports such as samba, lifesaving, and chess. The Global Association of International Sport Federations (GAISF) includes over 100 Olympic and non-Olympic sport federations, but entering 2020, there was no recognition of a federation for esports.
According to the Olympic Charter, without a universally recognized independent, nongovernmental international federation, esports is not eligible for consideration as an Olympic event. The IOC concluded that there was currently no organization representing esports globally that aligned with the Olympic movement, with officials citing fragmented governance, licensing issues, and inherent violence that were problematic (IOC News, 2018; Segerra, 2019). Despite the rhetoric precluding esports from becoming an Olympic sport in its current context, steps have been taken to set the stage for future inclusion.
For one, the International Esports Federation (IeSF), which works with 54 national esports federations around the world, has made formal applications and appeals with both the IOC and the GAISF for official recognition. In 2016, the federation received correspondence from the IOC outlining the evaluation process and next steps for esports to be considered as a recognized Olympic sport in the same manner as surfing, rock climbing, and other recent additions to the cadre of events (Polacek, 2016).
Despite the setback with the IeSF not being officially recognized, esports has been a topic at major international meetings, including the 2017 Olympic Summit (IOC News, 2017). The IOC and GAISF co-hosted an esports forum involving over 150 industry representatives, which led to the formation of an esports liaison group with a platform at the GAISF International Federations forum, the Associations of the National Olympic Committees General Assembly, and future IOC Olympic Summits (IOC News, 2018).
Possibly the greatest support for esports as a possible future Olympic event is its inclusion as a medal sport at the 2022 Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia. The Asian Games are a continental event recognized by the IOC. The Asian Electronic Sports Federation (AESF) is recognized by the Olympic Council of Asia, which governs the Asian Games.
While continental Games typically include nonmainstream sports that are germane to a geographic region (e.g., canoe polo and esports were a demonstration sport at the 2018 Asian Games), it is problematic to identify competitive gaming as a potential Olympic sport (“AESF Confirms,” 2018). However, discussions are emerging for inclusion of esports as an exhibition event, either at the 2024 Paris Olympics, likely in a restricted format, or through “virtual and connected” events preceding the Games and resembling online versions of existing sport such as sailing (Chao, 2017; Lanier, 2018; Morgan, 2019).
There is moderate anticipation that esports may one day be governed by a recognized international federation, whether it is the IeSF or another organization. In the meantime, there appear to be insurmountable hurdles to clear before esports would be considered a potential true Olympic sport.
What is leadership in sport organizations?
By Bonnie Tiell and Kelley Walton
Leadership Styles
Leadership style is the way leaders provide direction and motivate others. The styles proposed by Lewin, Lippet, and White (1939), Chelladurai (1978, 1984), and Goleman (2000) continue to resonate in the study of leadership and its application to the sports industry.
Classic Leadership Styles
Lewin et al. (1939) proposed that leaders demonstrate one of three styles of leadership: authoritarian, participative, or laissez-faire. These styles are generally used to describe the ways individuals lead, but as contingency theories suggest, a leader may select among the different styles for different audiences and situations.
The authoritarian, authoritative, or autocratic leader uses strong, directive actions to control the rules, regulations, activities, and relationships in the work environment. An autocratic leader often provides specific instructions or orders for achieving a task and rarely gives followers any authority in the choice of methods. The autocratic style has also been referred to as a militaristic or dictator style of leadership common to many elite Division I football and men's basketball coaches.
The participative style is exhibited by leaders who are considered fair and egalitarian and who involve others in decision making. Examples might include the sports professionals who serve as executives for national and global organizations (e.g., IOC, NCAA). The participative leadership style has also been described as a democratic style.
The laissez-faire or free-reign leadership style is exhibited by those who have little interaction with subordinates. As contingency leadership theories suggest, it is a style that may be most appropriate if a leader is supported by a competent and experienced staff in routine situations. For example, the executive director of a municipal recreation department with oversight for all summer camps may use a laissez-faire approach to supervise the youth sport director who has successfully organized the camp for the past seven years.
Multidimensional Leadership Style
Chelladurai (1978), a distinguished scholar in sport management, developed a multidimensional leadership model based on Lewin et al.'s three traditional styles. The model blends instructional behaviors (training), motivation tendencies, and two of Lewin's decision-making styles. The convergence of factors facilitates the choice of the best authoritative or participative leadership style based on the characteristics of the leader, situational characteristics, and the follower's “preferred” leadership behavior. Similar to the contingency theories on leadership, the result is a behavioral style that is best suited to the context of the situation. The multidimensional model suggests that effective leaders are those who can effectively modify their leadership style to meet the needs of the situation and the audience.
Contemporary Leadership Styles
Dan Goleman (2000), the authority on emotional and social intelligence, expanded on Lewin et al.'s model to develop six types of leadership styles: (1) coercive, (2) authoritative, (3) affiliative, (4) democratic, (5) pacesetting, and (6) coaching.
Goleman's approach to the field of leadership is postmodern and pragmatic. The researcher equates leadership styles with a set of golf clubs. Lower-handicap golfers instinctively know exactly which club to pull out in a given situation and are adept at using more than one (Goleman, 2000). Similarly, effective leaders with a governing role in sports can successfully employ a given style when necessary to obtain the desired results.
Goleman's work suggests the advantage to sport organizations of employing people who are strong in a particular leadership style that can compensate for deficiencies of the owner or other top authority. Table 2.5 provides a definition of each leadership style and an application of each to governing associations in the sport industry.
Digital and emerging media in sports
By Galen Clavio and Matthew Zimmerman
Sport media operate as a subset of the broader news and entertainment media, and that has been true in both traditional media and in digital and emerging media. As social networks emerged in the early part of the 21st century, sports played varying roles in the development of content and consumers. In some cases, sport media developed their own niches, and occasionally sport media acted as a leading audience attraction on certain media platforms.
The sport media industry is similar to other media sectors that are evolving from a physical domain to a digital economy, where consumers often create and publish their own content. This self-publishing landscape is filled with major challenges for governance issues related to illegal file sharing, piracy, and copyright infringement, whether intentional or accidental.
According to a Bloomberg report, there are over 20 million requests a week on Google web search engines to remove web links to copyright-protected material (Mola & Ovide, 2016). In 2016, a central repository noted complaints of copyright infringement applicable to over 1.5 billion websites (Mola & Ovide, 2016). According to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, companies are required to remove copyrighted material belonging to the rightful owner. When receiving notices of copyright violations, large Internet companies such as Facebook and YouTube often proceed to remove content without seeking permission from the person who published the material.
Due to the newness of digital and emerging media, traditional governance structures such as those found in broadcast and print ownership rules enforced by governments have not yet developed. Instead, the governance of these new media environments has been dictated by industry trends, audience affinities, and the suitability of certain technologies.
Net Neutrality
Complicating the sport media landscape even further has been the advent of high-speed Internet and mobile connectivity, the accompanying growth of social media, and online consumption of news and entertainment. While the World Wide Web was introduced in 1992, the importance of online sport media was minimal at best for the first 15 or so years following that date. Internet connections were slow, desktop-bound, and lacking infrastructure, since nearly all major aspects of sport media were still focused on traditional media channels such as printed newspapers, magazines, radio, and television.
However, the widespread growth of high-speed Internet in the early 2000s improved the quality and variety of available media content that consumers could access digitally. Instead of dial-up modem speeds restricting stories to words and an occasional photograph, high-speed Internet allowed for the transmission of data-rich media content such as audio and video.
By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, mobile devices had further enhanced the attractiveness of online sport media. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 (Silver, 2018) created a new world for sport media, one where pictures, sounds, and videos were not only digitally accessible, but portable. As sales of the iPhone and its competitor phones spiked over the next decade, digital sport media in all forms became increasingly important to consumers and media companies alike. Organizations asserted regulations such as blogging policies and social network guidelines to monitor the online behavior of employees (Linke & Zerfass, 2013).
During the 2010s, a policy debate developed concerning the way in which Internet service providers and cellular phone companies should be required to handle the transmission of data. The net neutrality conversation has confused a great many people, often because of deliberate misinformation spread by parties to the debate.
In simple terms, the concept of net neutrality is that all data should be treated equally on the Internet by Internet service providers (ISPs) and that companies should not be allowed to favor certain types of content, or content from certain providers, over content provided by others. Supporters of net neutrality argue that this equality of content has been a building block of the success of digital media over its first few decades of development, with consumers able to access data across platforms and content providers with ease. Internet service providers and major content providers, however, have argued that net neutrality stifles innovation and consumer choice (Geller, 2015).
Net neutrality affects sport media in important ways. Access to any digital sport media content is made through an ISP, either via a high-speed Internet subscription or through a mobile phone data plan. The absence of net neutrality creates the possibility that one of these data providers could choose to block or restrict access to another company's content because it rivals the content being provided by that data company or its business partners. Hypothetically, the lack of net neutrality protections could allow a company like Verizon as a mobile data provider to partner with the NFL and allow privileged status to streaming video from that entity, while throttling or restricting access by consumers to streaming video from other professional leagues.
The FCC's position on net neutrality became a highly partisan issue during the last half of the 2010s, with a Barack Obama administration-appointed FCC chairman designating the Internet as a public telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (Ruiz, 2015). Two years later, a Donald Trump administration-appointed FCC chairman moved to roll back those protections, with the repeal of those rules taking effect in 2018.
It is uncertain what the future holds for net neutrality, but it is worth noting that sport media entities continue to expand into the digital media space, with large organizations such as ESPN launching subscription streaming services containing access to wide swaths of content (Ha, 2019). As streaming services continue to expand, particular media and entertainment trends have become apparent. These market trends are described in table 9.4.
Esports and the Olympic Games
By Steve Borawski, Michael Kidd, and Bonnie Tiell
Governance in Action 14.2
An international federation is the cornerstone of global governance for traditional sports ranging from cycling, ice hockey, and softball to more obscure sports such as samba, lifesaving, and chess. The Global Association of International Sport Federations (GAISF) includes over 100 Olympic and non-Olympic sport federations, but entering 2020, there was no recognition of a federation for esports.
According to the Olympic Charter, without a universally recognized independent, nongovernmental international federation, esports is not eligible for consideration as an Olympic event. The IOC concluded that there was currently no organization representing esports globally that aligned with the Olympic movement, with officials citing fragmented governance, licensing issues, and inherent violence that were problematic (IOC News, 2018; Segerra, 2019). Despite the rhetoric precluding esports from becoming an Olympic sport in its current context, steps have been taken to set the stage for future inclusion.
For one, the International Esports Federation (IeSF), which works with 54 national esports federations around the world, has made formal applications and appeals with both the IOC and the GAISF for official recognition. In 2016, the federation received correspondence from the IOC outlining the evaluation process and next steps for esports to be considered as a recognized Olympic sport in the same manner as surfing, rock climbing, and other recent additions to the cadre of events (Polacek, 2016).
Despite the setback with the IeSF not being officially recognized, esports has been a topic at major international meetings, including the 2017 Olympic Summit (IOC News, 2017). The IOC and GAISF co-hosted an esports forum involving over 150 industry representatives, which led to the formation of an esports liaison group with a platform at the GAISF International Federations forum, the Associations of the National Olympic Committees General Assembly, and future IOC Olympic Summits (IOC News, 2018).
Possibly the greatest support for esports as a possible future Olympic event is its inclusion as a medal sport at the 2022 Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia. The Asian Games are a continental event recognized by the IOC. The Asian Electronic Sports Federation (AESF) is recognized by the Olympic Council of Asia, which governs the Asian Games.
While continental Games typically include nonmainstream sports that are germane to a geographic region (e.g., canoe polo and esports were a demonstration sport at the 2018 Asian Games), it is problematic to identify competitive gaming as a potential Olympic sport (“AESF Confirms,” 2018). However, discussions are emerging for inclusion of esports as an exhibition event, either at the 2024 Paris Olympics, likely in a restricted format, or through “virtual and connected” events preceding the Games and resembling online versions of existing sport such as sailing (Chao, 2017; Lanier, 2018; Morgan, 2019).
There is moderate anticipation that esports may one day be governed by a recognized international federation, whether it is the IeSF or another organization. In the meantime, there appear to be insurmountable hurdles to clear before esports would be considered a potential true Olympic sport.
What is leadership in sport organizations?
By Bonnie Tiell and Kelley Walton
Leadership Styles
Leadership style is the way leaders provide direction and motivate others. The styles proposed by Lewin, Lippet, and White (1939), Chelladurai (1978, 1984), and Goleman (2000) continue to resonate in the study of leadership and its application to the sports industry.
Classic Leadership Styles
Lewin et al. (1939) proposed that leaders demonstrate one of three styles of leadership: authoritarian, participative, or laissez-faire. These styles are generally used to describe the ways individuals lead, but as contingency theories suggest, a leader may select among the different styles for different audiences and situations.
The authoritarian, authoritative, or autocratic leader uses strong, directive actions to control the rules, regulations, activities, and relationships in the work environment. An autocratic leader often provides specific instructions or orders for achieving a task and rarely gives followers any authority in the choice of methods. The autocratic style has also been referred to as a militaristic or dictator style of leadership common to many elite Division I football and men's basketball coaches.
The participative style is exhibited by leaders who are considered fair and egalitarian and who involve others in decision making. Examples might include the sports professionals who serve as executives for national and global organizations (e.g., IOC, NCAA). The participative leadership style has also been described as a democratic style.
The laissez-faire or free-reign leadership style is exhibited by those who have little interaction with subordinates. As contingency leadership theories suggest, it is a style that may be most appropriate if a leader is supported by a competent and experienced staff in routine situations. For example, the executive director of a municipal recreation department with oversight for all summer camps may use a laissez-faire approach to supervise the youth sport director who has successfully organized the camp for the past seven years.
Multidimensional Leadership Style
Chelladurai (1978), a distinguished scholar in sport management, developed a multidimensional leadership model based on Lewin et al.'s three traditional styles. The model blends instructional behaviors (training), motivation tendencies, and two of Lewin's decision-making styles. The convergence of factors facilitates the choice of the best authoritative or participative leadership style based on the characteristics of the leader, situational characteristics, and the follower's “preferred” leadership behavior. Similar to the contingency theories on leadership, the result is a behavioral style that is best suited to the context of the situation. The multidimensional model suggests that effective leaders are those who can effectively modify their leadership style to meet the needs of the situation and the audience.
Contemporary Leadership Styles
Dan Goleman (2000), the authority on emotional and social intelligence, expanded on Lewin et al.'s model to develop six types of leadership styles: (1) coercive, (2) authoritative, (3) affiliative, (4) democratic, (5) pacesetting, and (6) coaching.
Goleman's approach to the field of leadership is postmodern and pragmatic. The researcher equates leadership styles with a set of golf clubs. Lower-handicap golfers instinctively know exactly which club to pull out in a given situation and are adept at using more than one (Goleman, 2000). Similarly, effective leaders with a governing role in sports can successfully employ a given style when necessary to obtain the desired results.
Goleman's work suggests the advantage to sport organizations of employing people who are strong in a particular leadership style that can compensate for deficiencies of the owner or other top authority. Table 2.5 provides a definition of each leadership style and an application of each to governing associations in the sport industry.
Digital and emerging media in sports
By Galen Clavio and Matthew Zimmerman
Sport media operate as a subset of the broader news and entertainment media, and that has been true in both traditional media and in digital and emerging media. As social networks emerged in the early part of the 21st century, sports played varying roles in the development of content and consumers. In some cases, sport media developed their own niches, and occasionally sport media acted as a leading audience attraction on certain media platforms.
The sport media industry is similar to other media sectors that are evolving from a physical domain to a digital economy, where consumers often create and publish their own content. This self-publishing landscape is filled with major challenges for governance issues related to illegal file sharing, piracy, and copyright infringement, whether intentional or accidental.
According to a Bloomberg report, there are over 20 million requests a week on Google web search engines to remove web links to copyright-protected material (Mola & Ovide, 2016). In 2016, a central repository noted complaints of copyright infringement applicable to over 1.5 billion websites (Mola & Ovide, 2016). According to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, companies are required to remove copyrighted material belonging to the rightful owner. When receiving notices of copyright violations, large Internet companies such as Facebook and YouTube often proceed to remove content without seeking permission from the person who published the material.
Due to the newness of digital and emerging media, traditional governance structures such as those found in broadcast and print ownership rules enforced by governments have not yet developed. Instead, the governance of these new media environments has been dictated by industry trends, audience affinities, and the suitability of certain technologies.
Net Neutrality
Complicating the sport media landscape even further has been the advent of high-speed Internet and mobile connectivity, the accompanying growth of social media, and online consumption of news and entertainment. While the World Wide Web was introduced in 1992, the importance of online sport media was minimal at best for the first 15 or so years following that date. Internet connections were slow, desktop-bound, and lacking infrastructure, since nearly all major aspects of sport media were still focused on traditional media channels such as printed newspapers, magazines, radio, and television.
However, the widespread growth of high-speed Internet in the early 2000s improved the quality and variety of available media content that consumers could access digitally. Instead of dial-up modem speeds restricting stories to words and an occasional photograph, high-speed Internet allowed for the transmission of data-rich media content such as audio and video.
By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, mobile devices had further enhanced the attractiveness of online sport media. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 (Silver, 2018) created a new world for sport media, one where pictures, sounds, and videos were not only digitally accessible, but portable. As sales of the iPhone and its competitor phones spiked over the next decade, digital sport media in all forms became increasingly important to consumers and media companies alike. Organizations asserted regulations such as blogging policies and social network guidelines to monitor the online behavior of employees (Linke & Zerfass, 2013).
During the 2010s, a policy debate developed concerning the way in which Internet service providers and cellular phone companies should be required to handle the transmission of data. The net neutrality conversation has confused a great many people, often because of deliberate misinformation spread by parties to the debate.
In simple terms, the concept of net neutrality is that all data should be treated equally on the Internet by Internet service providers (ISPs) and that companies should not be allowed to favor certain types of content, or content from certain providers, over content provided by others. Supporters of net neutrality argue that this equality of content has been a building block of the success of digital media over its first few decades of development, with consumers able to access data across platforms and content providers with ease. Internet service providers and major content providers, however, have argued that net neutrality stifles innovation and consumer choice (Geller, 2015).
Net neutrality affects sport media in important ways. Access to any digital sport media content is made through an ISP, either via a high-speed Internet subscription or through a mobile phone data plan. The absence of net neutrality creates the possibility that one of these data providers could choose to block or restrict access to another company's content because it rivals the content being provided by that data company or its business partners. Hypothetically, the lack of net neutrality protections could allow a company like Verizon as a mobile data provider to partner with the NFL and allow privileged status to streaming video from that entity, while throttling or restricting access by consumers to streaming video from other professional leagues.
The FCC's position on net neutrality became a highly partisan issue during the last half of the 2010s, with a Barack Obama administration-appointed FCC chairman designating the Internet as a public telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (Ruiz, 2015). Two years later, a Donald Trump administration-appointed FCC chairman moved to roll back those protections, with the repeal of those rules taking effect in 2018.
It is uncertain what the future holds for net neutrality, but it is worth noting that sport media entities continue to expand into the digital media space, with large organizations such as ESPN launching subscription streaming services containing access to wide swaths of content (Ha, 2019). As streaming services continue to expand, particular media and entertainment trends have become apparent. These market trends are described in table 9.4.
Esports and the Olympic Games
By Steve Borawski, Michael Kidd, and Bonnie Tiell
Governance in Action 14.2
An international federation is the cornerstone of global governance for traditional sports ranging from cycling, ice hockey, and softball to more obscure sports such as samba, lifesaving, and chess. The Global Association of International Sport Federations (GAISF) includes over 100 Olympic and non-Olympic sport federations, but entering 2020, there was no recognition of a federation for esports.
According to the Olympic Charter, without a universally recognized independent, nongovernmental international federation, esports is not eligible for consideration as an Olympic event. The IOC concluded that there was currently no organization representing esports globally that aligned with the Olympic movement, with officials citing fragmented governance, licensing issues, and inherent violence that were problematic (IOC News, 2018; Segerra, 2019). Despite the rhetoric precluding esports from becoming an Olympic sport in its current context, steps have been taken to set the stage for future inclusion.
For one, the International Esports Federation (IeSF), which works with 54 national esports federations around the world, has made formal applications and appeals with both the IOC and the GAISF for official recognition. In 2016, the federation received correspondence from the IOC outlining the evaluation process and next steps for esports to be considered as a recognized Olympic sport in the same manner as surfing, rock climbing, and other recent additions to the cadre of events (Polacek, 2016).
Despite the setback with the IeSF not being officially recognized, esports has been a topic at major international meetings, including the 2017 Olympic Summit (IOC News, 2017). The IOC and GAISF co-hosted an esports forum involving over 150 industry representatives, which led to the formation of an esports liaison group with a platform at the GAISF International Federations forum, the Associations of the National Olympic Committees General Assembly, and future IOC Olympic Summits (IOC News, 2018).
Possibly the greatest support for esports as a possible future Olympic event is its inclusion as a medal sport at the 2022 Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia. The Asian Games are a continental event recognized by the IOC. The Asian Electronic Sports Federation (AESF) is recognized by the Olympic Council of Asia, which governs the Asian Games.
While continental Games typically include nonmainstream sports that are germane to a geographic region (e.g., canoe polo and esports were a demonstration sport at the 2018 Asian Games), it is problematic to identify competitive gaming as a potential Olympic sport (“AESF Confirms,” 2018). However, discussions are emerging for inclusion of esports as an exhibition event, either at the 2024 Paris Olympics, likely in a restricted format, or through “virtual and connected” events preceding the Games and resembling online versions of existing sport such as sailing (Chao, 2017; Lanier, 2018; Morgan, 2019).
There is moderate anticipation that esports may one day be governed by a recognized international federation, whether it is the IeSF or another organization. In the meantime, there appear to be insurmountable hurdles to clear before esports would be considered a potential true Olympic sport.
What is leadership in sport organizations?
By Bonnie Tiell and Kelley Walton
Leadership Styles
Leadership style is the way leaders provide direction and motivate others. The styles proposed by Lewin, Lippet, and White (1939), Chelladurai (1978, 1984), and Goleman (2000) continue to resonate in the study of leadership and its application to the sports industry.
Classic Leadership Styles
Lewin et al. (1939) proposed that leaders demonstrate one of three styles of leadership: authoritarian, participative, or laissez-faire. These styles are generally used to describe the ways individuals lead, but as contingency theories suggest, a leader may select among the different styles for different audiences and situations.
The authoritarian, authoritative, or autocratic leader uses strong, directive actions to control the rules, regulations, activities, and relationships in the work environment. An autocratic leader often provides specific instructions or orders for achieving a task and rarely gives followers any authority in the choice of methods. The autocratic style has also been referred to as a militaristic or dictator style of leadership common to many elite Division I football and men's basketball coaches.
The participative style is exhibited by leaders who are considered fair and egalitarian and who involve others in decision making. Examples might include the sports professionals who serve as executives for national and global organizations (e.g., IOC, NCAA). The participative leadership style has also been described as a democratic style.
The laissez-faire or free-reign leadership style is exhibited by those who have little interaction with subordinates. As contingency leadership theories suggest, it is a style that may be most appropriate if a leader is supported by a competent and experienced staff in routine situations. For example, the executive director of a municipal recreation department with oversight for all summer camps may use a laissez-faire approach to supervise the youth sport director who has successfully organized the camp for the past seven years.
Multidimensional Leadership Style
Chelladurai (1978), a distinguished scholar in sport management, developed a multidimensional leadership model based on Lewin et al.'s three traditional styles. The model blends instructional behaviors (training), motivation tendencies, and two of Lewin's decision-making styles. The convergence of factors facilitates the choice of the best authoritative or participative leadership style based on the characteristics of the leader, situational characteristics, and the follower's “preferred” leadership behavior. Similar to the contingency theories on leadership, the result is a behavioral style that is best suited to the context of the situation. The multidimensional model suggests that effective leaders are those who can effectively modify their leadership style to meet the needs of the situation and the audience.
Contemporary Leadership Styles
Dan Goleman (2000), the authority on emotional and social intelligence, expanded on Lewin et al.'s model to develop six types of leadership styles: (1) coercive, (2) authoritative, (3) affiliative, (4) democratic, (5) pacesetting, and (6) coaching.
Goleman's approach to the field of leadership is postmodern and pragmatic. The researcher equates leadership styles with a set of golf clubs. Lower-handicap golfers instinctively know exactly which club to pull out in a given situation and are adept at using more than one (Goleman, 2000). Similarly, effective leaders with a governing role in sports can successfully employ a given style when necessary to obtain the desired results.
Goleman's work suggests the advantage to sport organizations of employing people who are strong in a particular leadership style that can compensate for deficiencies of the owner or other top authority. Table 2.5 provides a definition of each leadership style and an application of each to governing associations in the sport industry.
Digital and emerging media in sports
By Galen Clavio and Matthew Zimmerman
Sport media operate as a subset of the broader news and entertainment media, and that has been true in both traditional media and in digital and emerging media. As social networks emerged in the early part of the 21st century, sports played varying roles in the development of content and consumers. In some cases, sport media developed their own niches, and occasionally sport media acted as a leading audience attraction on certain media platforms.
The sport media industry is similar to other media sectors that are evolving from a physical domain to a digital economy, where consumers often create and publish their own content. This self-publishing landscape is filled with major challenges for governance issues related to illegal file sharing, piracy, and copyright infringement, whether intentional or accidental.
According to a Bloomberg report, there are over 20 million requests a week on Google web search engines to remove web links to copyright-protected material (Mola & Ovide, 2016). In 2016, a central repository noted complaints of copyright infringement applicable to over 1.5 billion websites (Mola & Ovide, 2016). According to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, companies are required to remove copyrighted material belonging to the rightful owner. When receiving notices of copyright violations, large Internet companies such as Facebook and YouTube often proceed to remove content without seeking permission from the person who published the material.
Due to the newness of digital and emerging media, traditional governance structures such as those found in broadcast and print ownership rules enforced by governments have not yet developed. Instead, the governance of these new media environments has been dictated by industry trends, audience affinities, and the suitability of certain technologies.
Net Neutrality
Complicating the sport media landscape even further has been the advent of high-speed Internet and mobile connectivity, the accompanying growth of social media, and online consumption of news and entertainment. While the World Wide Web was introduced in 1992, the importance of online sport media was minimal at best for the first 15 or so years following that date. Internet connections were slow, desktop-bound, and lacking infrastructure, since nearly all major aspects of sport media were still focused on traditional media channels such as printed newspapers, magazines, radio, and television.
However, the widespread growth of high-speed Internet in the early 2000s improved the quality and variety of available media content that consumers could access digitally. Instead of dial-up modem speeds restricting stories to words and an occasional photograph, high-speed Internet allowed for the transmission of data-rich media content such as audio and video.
By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, mobile devices had further enhanced the attractiveness of online sport media. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 (Silver, 2018) created a new world for sport media, one where pictures, sounds, and videos were not only digitally accessible, but portable. As sales of the iPhone and its competitor phones spiked over the next decade, digital sport media in all forms became increasingly important to consumers and media companies alike. Organizations asserted regulations such as blogging policies and social network guidelines to monitor the online behavior of employees (Linke & Zerfass, 2013).
During the 2010s, a policy debate developed concerning the way in which Internet service providers and cellular phone companies should be required to handle the transmission of data. The net neutrality conversation has confused a great many people, often because of deliberate misinformation spread by parties to the debate.
In simple terms, the concept of net neutrality is that all data should be treated equally on the Internet by Internet service providers (ISPs) and that companies should not be allowed to favor certain types of content, or content from certain providers, over content provided by others. Supporters of net neutrality argue that this equality of content has been a building block of the success of digital media over its first few decades of development, with consumers able to access data across platforms and content providers with ease. Internet service providers and major content providers, however, have argued that net neutrality stifles innovation and consumer choice (Geller, 2015).
Net neutrality affects sport media in important ways. Access to any digital sport media content is made through an ISP, either via a high-speed Internet subscription or through a mobile phone data plan. The absence of net neutrality creates the possibility that one of these data providers could choose to block or restrict access to another company's content because it rivals the content being provided by that data company or its business partners. Hypothetically, the lack of net neutrality protections could allow a company like Verizon as a mobile data provider to partner with the NFL and allow privileged status to streaming video from that entity, while throttling or restricting access by consumers to streaming video from other professional leagues.
The FCC's position on net neutrality became a highly partisan issue during the last half of the 2010s, with a Barack Obama administration-appointed FCC chairman designating the Internet as a public telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (Ruiz, 2015). Two years later, a Donald Trump administration-appointed FCC chairman moved to roll back those protections, with the repeal of those rules taking effect in 2018.
It is uncertain what the future holds for net neutrality, but it is worth noting that sport media entities continue to expand into the digital media space, with large organizations such as ESPN launching subscription streaming services containing access to wide swaths of content (Ha, 2019). As streaming services continue to expand, particular media and entertainment trends have become apparent. These market trends are described in table 9.4.
Esports and the Olympic Games
By Steve Borawski, Michael Kidd, and Bonnie Tiell
Governance in Action 14.2
An international federation is the cornerstone of global governance for traditional sports ranging from cycling, ice hockey, and softball to more obscure sports such as samba, lifesaving, and chess. The Global Association of International Sport Federations (GAISF) includes over 100 Olympic and non-Olympic sport federations, but entering 2020, there was no recognition of a federation for esports.
According to the Olympic Charter, without a universally recognized independent, nongovernmental international federation, esports is not eligible for consideration as an Olympic event. The IOC concluded that there was currently no organization representing esports globally that aligned with the Olympic movement, with officials citing fragmented governance, licensing issues, and inherent violence that were problematic (IOC News, 2018; Segerra, 2019). Despite the rhetoric precluding esports from becoming an Olympic sport in its current context, steps have been taken to set the stage for future inclusion.
For one, the International Esports Federation (IeSF), which works with 54 national esports federations around the world, has made formal applications and appeals with both the IOC and the GAISF for official recognition. In 2016, the federation received correspondence from the IOC outlining the evaluation process and next steps for esports to be considered as a recognized Olympic sport in the same manner as surfing, rock climbing, and other recent additions to the cadre of events (Polacek, 2016).
Despite the setback with the IeSF not being officially recognized, esports has been a topic at major international meetings, including the 2017 Olympic Summit (IOC News, 2017). The IOC and GAISF co-hosted an esports forum involving over 150 industry representatives, which led to the formation of an esports liaison group with a platform at the GAISF International Federations forum, the Associations of the National Olympic Committees General Assembly, and future IOC Olympic Summits (IOC News, 2018).
Possibly the greatest support for esports as a possible future Olympic event is its inclusion as a medal sport at the 2022 Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia. The Asian Games are a continental event recognized by the IOC. The Asian Electronic Sports Federation (AESF) is recognized by the Olympic Council of Asia, which governs the Asian Games.
While continental Games typically include nonmainstream sports that are germane to a geographic region (e.g., canoe polo and esports were a demonstration sport at the 2018 Asian Games), it is problematic to identify competitive gaming as a potential Olympic sport (“AESF Confirms,” 2018). However, discussions are emerging for inclusion of esports as an exhibition event, either at the 2024 Paris Olympics, likely in a restricted format, or through “virtual and connected” events preceding the Games and resembling online versions of existing sport such as sailing (Chao, 2017; Lanier, 2018; Morgan, 2019).
There is moderate anticipation that esports may one day be governed by a recognized international federation, whether it is the IeSF or another organization. In the meantime, there appear to be insurmountable hurdles to clear before esports would be considered a potential true Olympic sport.
What is leadership in sport organizations?
By Bonnie Tiell and Kelley Walton
Leadership Styles
Leadership style is the way leaders provide direction and motivate others. The styles proposed by Lewin, Lippet, and White (1939), Chelladurai (1978, 1984), and Goleman (2000) continue to resonate in the study of leadership and its application to the sports industry.
Classic Leadership Styles
Lewin et al. (1939) proposed that leaders demonstrate one of three styles of leadership: authoritarian, participative, or laissez-faire. These styles are generally used to describe the ways individuals lead, but as contingency theories suggest, a leader may select among the different styles for different audiences and situations.
The authoritarian, authoritative, or autocratic leader uses strong, directive actions to control the rules, regulations, activities, and relationships in the work environment. An autocratic leader often provides specific instructions or orders for achieving a task and rarely gives followers any authority in the choice of methods. The autocratic style has also been referred to as a militaristic or dictator style of leadership common to many elite Division I football and men's basketball coaches.
The participative style is exhibited by leaders who are considered fair and egalitarian and who involve others in decision making. Examples might include the sports professionals who serve as executives for national and global organizations (e.g., IOC, NCAA). The participative leadership style has also been described as a democratic style.
The laissez-faire or free-reign leadership style is exhibited by those who have little interaction with subordinates. As contingency leadership theories suggest, it is a style that may be most appropriate if a leader is supported by a competent and experienced staff in routine situations. For example, the executive director of a municipal recreation department with oversight for all summer camps may use a laissez-faire approach to supervise the youth sport director who has successfully organized the camp for the past seven years.
Multidimensional Leadership Style
Chelladurai (1978), a distinguished scholar in sport management, developed a multidimensional leadership model based on Lewin et al.'s three traditional styles. The model blends instructional behaviors (training), motivation tendencies, and two of Lewin's decision-making styles. The convergence of factors facilitates the choice of the best authoritative or participative leadership style based on the characteristics of the leader, situational characteristics, and the follower's “preferred” leadership behavior. Similar to the contingency theories on leadership, the result is a behavioral style that is best suited to the context of the situation. The multidimensional model suggests that effective leaders are those who can effectively modify their leadership style to meet the needs of the situation and the audience.
Contemporary Leadership Styles
Dan Goleman (2000), the authority on emotional and social intelligence, expanded on Lewin et al.'s model to develop six types of leadership styles: (1) coercive, (2) authoritative, (3) affiliative, (4) democratic, (5) pacesetting, and (6) coaching.
Goleman's approach to the field of leadership is postmodern and pragmatic. The researcher equates leadership styles with a set of golf clubs. Lower-handicap golfers instinctively know exactly which club to pull out in a given situation and are adept at using more than one (Goleman, 2000). Similarly, effective leaders with a governing role in sports can successfully employ a given style when necessary to obtain the desired results.
Goleman's work suggests the advantage to sport organizations of employing people who are strong in a particular leadership style that can compensate for deficiencies of the owner or other top authority. Table 2.5 provides a definition of each leadership style and an application of each to governing associations in the sport industry.
Digital and emerging media in sports
By Galen Clavio and Matthew Zimmerman
Sport media operate as a subset of the broader news and entertainment media, and that has been true in both traditional media and in digital and emerging media. As social networks emerged in the early part of the 21st century, sports played varying roles in the development of content and consumers. In some cases, sport media developed their own niches, and occasionally sport media acted as a leading audience attraction on certain media platforms.
The sport media industry is similar to other media sectors that are evolving from a physical domain to a digital economy, where consumers often create and publish their own content. This self-publishing landscape is filled with major challenges for governance issues related to illegal file sharing, piracy, and copyright infringement, whether intentional or accidental.
According to a Bloomberg report, there are over 20 million requests a week on Google web search engines to remove web links to copyright-protected material (Mola & Ovide, 2016). In 2016, a central repository noted complaints of copyright infringement applicable to over 1.5 billion websites (Mola & Ovide, 2016). According to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, companies are required to remove copyrighted material belonging to the rightful owner. When receiving notices of copyright violations, large Internet companies such as Facebook and YouTube often proceed to remove content without seeking permission from the person who published the material.
Due to the newness of digital and emerging media, traditional governance structures such as those found in broadcast and print ownership rules enforced by governments have not yet developed. Instead, the governance of these new media environments has been dictated by industry trends, audience affinities, and the suitability of certain technologies.
Net Neutrality
Complicating the sport media landscape even further has been the advent of high-speed Internet and mobile connectivity, the accompanying growth of social media, and online consumption of news and entertainment. While the World Wide Web was introduced in 1992, the importance of online sport media was minimal at best for the first 15 or so years following that date. Internet connections were slow, desktop-bound, and lacking infrastructure, since nearly all major aspects of sport media were still focused on traditional media channels such as printed newspapers, magazines, radio, and television.
However, the widespread growth of high-speed Internet in the early 2000s improved the quality and variety of available media content that consumers could access digitally. Instead of dial-up modem speeds restricting stories to words and an occasional photograph, high-speed Internet allowed for the transmission of data-rich media content such as audio and video.
By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, mobile devices had further enhanced the attractiveness of online sport media. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 (Silver, 2018) created a new world for sport media, one where pictures, sounds, and videos were not only digitally accessible, but portable. As sales of the iPhone and its competitor phones spiked over the next decade, digital sport media in all forms became increasingly important to consumers and media companies alike. Organizations asserted regulations such as blogging policies and social network guidelines to monitor the online behavior of employees (Linke & Zerfass, 2013).
During the 2010s, a policy debate developed concerning the way in which Internet service providers and cellular phone companies should be required to handle the transmission of data. The net neutrality conversation has confused a great many people, often because of deliberate misinformation spread by parties to the debate.
In simple terms, the concept of net neutrality is that all data should be treated equally on the Internet by Internet service providers (ISPs) and that companies should not be allowed to favor certain types of content, or content from certain providers, over content provided by others. Supporters of net neutrality argue that this equality of content has been a building block of the success of digital media over its first few decades of development, with consumers able to access data across platforms and content providers with ease. Internet service providers and major content providers, however, have argued that net neutrality stifles innovation and consumer choice (Geller, 2015).
Net neutrality affects sport media in important ways. Access to any digital sport media content is made through an ISP, either via a high-speed Internet subscription or through a mobile phone data plan. The absence of net neutrality creates the possibility that one of these data providers could choose to block or restrict access to another company's content because it rivals the content being provided by that data company or its business partners. Hypothetically, the lack of net neutrality protections could allow a company like Verizon as a mobile data provider to partner with the NFL and allow privileged status to streaming video from that entity, while throttling or restricting access by consumers to streaming video from other professional leagues.
The FCC's position on net neutrality became a highly partisan issue during the last half of the 2010s, with a Barack Obama administration-appointed FCC chairman designating the Internet as a public telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (Ruiz, 2015). Two years later, a Donald Trump administration-appointed FCC chairman moved to roll back those protections, with the repeal of those rules taking effect in 2018.
It is uncertain what the future holds for net neutrality, but it is worth noting that sport media entities continue to expand into the digital media space, with large organizations such as ESPN launching subscription streaming services containing access to wide swaths of content (Ha, 2019). As streaming services continue to expand, particular media and entertainment trends have become apparent. These market trends are described in table 9.4.
Esports and the Olympic Games
By Steve Borawski, Michael Kidd, and Bonnie Tiell
Governance in Action 14.2
An international federation is the cornerstone of global governance for traditional sports ranging from cycling, ice hockey, and softball to more obscure sports such as samba, lifesaving, and chess. The Global Association of International Sport Federations (GAISF) includes over 100 Olympic and non-Olympic sport federations, but entering 2020, there was no recognition of a federation for esports.
According to the Olympic Charter, without a universally recognized independent, nongovernmental international federation, esports is not eligible for consideration as an Olympic event. The IOC concluded that there was currently no organization representing esports globally that aligned with the Olympic movement, with officials citing fragmented governance, licensing issues, and inherent violence that were problematic (IOC News, 2018; Segerra, 2019). Despite the rhetoric precluding esports from becoming an Olympic sport in its current context, steps have been taken to set the stage for future inclusion.
For one, the International Esports Federation (IeSF), which works with 54 national esports federations around the world, has made formal applications and appeals with both the IOC and the GAISF for official recognition. In 2016, the federation received correspondence from the IOC outlining the evaluation process and next steps for esports to be considered as a recognized Olympic sport in the same manner as surfing, rock climbing, and other recent additions to the cadre of events (Polacek, 2016).
Despite the setback with the IeSF not being officially recognized, esports has been a topic at major international meetings, including the 2017 Olympic Summit (IOC News, 2017). The IOC and GAISF co-hosted an esports forum involving over 150 industry representatives, which led to the formation of an esports liaison group with a platform at the GAISF International Federations forum, the Associations of the National Olympic Committees General Assembly, and future IOC Olympic Summits (IOC News, 2018).
Possibly the greatest support for esports as a possible future Olympic event is its inclusion as a medal sport at the 2022 Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia. The Asian Games are a continental event recognized by the IOC. The Asian Electronic Sports Federation (AESF) is recognized by the Olympic Council of Asia, which governs the Asian Games.
While continental Games typically include nonmainstream sports that are germane to a geographic region (e.g., canoe polo and esports were a demonstration sport at the 2018 Asian Games), it is problematic to identify competitive gaming as a potential Olympic sport (“AESF Confirms,” 2018). However, discussions are emerging for inclusion of esports as an exhibition event, either at the 2024 Paris Olympics, likely in a restricted format, or through “virtual and connected” events preceding the Games and resembling online versions of existing sport such as sailing (Chao, 2017; Lanier, 2018; Morgan, 2019).
There is moderate anticipation that esports may one day be governed by a recognized international federation, whether it is the IeSF or another organization. In the meantime, there appear to be insurmountable hurdles to clear before esports would be considered a potential true Olympic sport.
What is leadership in sport organizations?
By Bonnie Tiell and Kelley Walton
Leadership Styles
Leadership style is the way leaders provide direction and motivate others. The styles proposed by Lewin, Lippet, and White (1939), Chelladurai (1978, 1984), and Goleman (2000) continue to resonate in the study of leadership and its application to the sports industry.
Classic Leadership Styles
Lewin et al. (1939) proposed that leaders demonstrate one of three styles of leadership: authoritarian, participative, or laissez-faire. These styles are generally used to describe the ways individuals lead, but as contingency theories suggest, a leader may select among the different styles for different audiences and situations.
The authoritarian, authoritative, or autocratic leader uses strong, directive actions to control the rules, regulations, activities, and relationships in the work environment. An autocratic leader often provides specific instructions or orders for achieving a task and rarely gives followers any authority in the choice of methods. The autocratic style has also been referred to as a militaristic or dictator style of leadership common to many elite Division I football and men's basketball coaches.
The participative style is exhibited by leaders who are considered fair and egalitarian and who involve others in decision making. Examples might include the sports professionals who serve as executives for national and global organizations (e.g., IOC, NCAA). The participative leadership style has also been described as a democratic style.
The laissez-faire or free-reign leadership style is exhibited by those who have little interaction with subordinates. As contingency leadership theories suggest, it is a style that may be most appropriate if a leader is supported by a competent and experienced staff in routine situations. For example, the executive director of a municipal recreation department with oversight for all summer camps may use a laissez-faire approach to supervise the youth sport director who has successfully organized the camp for the past seven years.
Multidimensional Leadership Style
Chelladurai (1978), a distinguished scholar in sport management, developed a multidimensional leadership model based on Lewin et al.'s three traditional styles. The model blends instructional behaviors (training), motivation tendencies, and two of Lewin's decision-making styles. The convergence of factors facilitates the choice of the best authoritative or participative leadership style based on the characteristics of the leader, situational characteristics, and the follower's “preferred” leadership behavior. Similar to the contingency theories on leadership, the result is a behavioral style that is best suited to the context of the situation. The multidimensional model suggests that effective leaders are those who can effectively modify their leadership style to meet the needs of the situation and the audience.
Contemporary Leadership Styles
Dan Goleman (2000), the authority on emotional and social intelligence, expanded on Lewin et al.'s model to develop six types of leadership styles: (1) coercive, (2) authoritative, (3) affiliative, (4) democratic, (5) pacesetting, and (6) coaching.
Goleman's approach to the field of leadership is postmodern and pragmatic. The researcher equates leadership styles with a set of golf clubs. Lower-handicap golfers instinctively know exactly which club to pull out in a given situation and are adept at using more than one (Goleman, 2000). Similarly, effective leaders with a governing role in sports can successfully employ a given style when necessary to obtain the desired results.
Goleman's work suggests the advantage to sport organizations of employing people who are strong in a particular leadership style that can compensate for deficiencies of the owner or other top authority. Table 2.5 provides a definition of each leadership style and an application of each to governing associations in the sport industry.
Digital and emerging media in sports
By Galen Clavio and Matthew Zimmerman
Sport media operate as a subset of the broader news and entertainment media, and that has been true in both traditional media and in digital and emerging media. As social networks emerged in the early part of the 21st century, sports played varying roles in the development of content and consumers. In some cases, sport media developed their own niches, and occasionally sport media acted as a leading audience attraction on certain media platforms.
The sport media industry is similar to other media sectors that are evolving from a physical domain to a digital economy, where consumers often create and publish their own content. This self-publishing landscape is filled with major challenges for governance issues related to illegal file sharing, piracy, and copyright infringement, whether intentional or accidental.
According to a Bloomberg report, there are over 20 million requests a week on Google web search engines to remove web links to copyright-protected material (Mola & Ovide, 2016). In 2016, a central repository noted complaints of copyright infringement applicable to over 1.5 billion websites (Mola & Ovide, 2016). According to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, companies are required to remove copyrighted material belonging to the rightful owner. When receiving notices of copyright violations, large Internet companies such as Facebook and YouTube often proceed to remove content without seeking permission from the person who published the material.
Due to the newness of digital and emerging media, traditional governance structures such as those found in broadcast and print ownership rules enforced by governments have not yet developed. Instead, the governance of these new media environments has been dictated by industry trends, audience affinities, and the suitability of certain technologies.
Net Neutrality
Complicating the sport media landscape even further has been the advent of high-speed Internet and mobile connectivity, the accompanying growth of social media, and online consumption of news and entertainment. While the World Wide Web was introduced in 1992, the importance of online sport media was minimal at best for the first 15 or so years following that date. Internet connections were slow, desktop-bound, and lacking infrastructure, since nearly all major aspects of sport media were still focused on traditional media channels such as printed newspapers, magazines, radio, and television.
However, the widespread growth of high-speed Internet in the early 2000s improved the quality and variety of available media content that consumers could access digitally. Instead of dial-up modem speeds restricting stories to words and an occasional photograph, high-speed Internet allowed for the transmission of data-rich media content such as audio and video.
By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, mobile devices had further enhanced the attractiveness of online sport media. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 (Silver, 2018) created a new world for sport media, one where pictures, sounds, and videos were not only digitally accessible, but portable. As sales of the iPhone and its competitor phones spiked over the next decade, digital sport media in all forms became increasingly important to consumers and media companies alike. Organizations asserted regulations such as blogging policies and social network guidelines to monitor the online behavior of employees (Linke & Zerfass, 2013).
During the 2010s, a policy debate developed concerning the way in which Internet service providers and cellular phone companies should be required to handle the transmission of data. The net neutrality conversation has confused a great many people, often because of deliberate misinformation spread by parties to the debate.
In simple terms, the concept of net neutrality is that all data should be treated equally on the Internet by Internet service providers (ISPs) and that companies should not be allowed to favor certain types of content, or content from certain providers, over content provided by others. Supporters of net neutrality argue that this equality of content has been a building block of the success of digital media over its first few decades of development, with consumers able to access data across platforms and content providers with ease. Internet service providers and major content providers, however, have argued that net neutrality stifles innovation and consumer choice (Geller, 2015).
Net neutrality affects sport media in important ways. Access to any digital sport media content is made through an ISP, either via a high-speed Internet subscription or through a mobile phone data plan. The absence of net neutrality creates the possibility that one of these data providers could choose to block or restrict access to another company's content because it rivals the content being provided by that data company or its business partners. Hypothetically, the lack of net neutrality protections could allow a company like Verizon as a mobile data provider to partner with the NFL and allow privileged status to streaming video from that entity, while throttling or restricting access by consumers to streaming video from other professional leagues.
The FCC's position on net neutrality became a highly partisan issue during the last half of the 2010s, with a Barack Obama administration-appointed FCC chairman designating the Internet as a public telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (Ruiz, 2015). Two years later, a Donald Trump administration-appointed FCC chairman moved to roll back those protections, with the repeal of those rules taking effect in 2018.
It is uncertain what the future holds for net neutrality, but it is worth noting that sport media entities continue to expand into the digital media space, with large organizations such as ESPN launching subscription streaming services containing access to wide swaths of content (Ha, 2019). As streaming services continue to expand, particular media and entertainment trends have become apparent. These market trends are described in table 9.4.
Esports and the Olympic Games
By Steve Borawski, Michael Kidd, and Bonnie Tiell
Governance in Action 14.2
An international federation is the cornerstone of global governance for traditional sports ranging from cycling, ice hockey, and softball to more obscure sports such as samba, lifesaving, and chess. The Global Association of International Sport Federations (GAISF) includes over 100 Olympic and non-Olympic sport federations, but entering 2020, there was no recognition of a federation for esports.
According to the Olympic Charter, without a universally recognized independent, nongovernmental international federation, esports is not eligible for consideration as an Olympic event. The IOC concluded that there was currently no organization representing esports globally that aligned with the Olympic movement, with officials citing fragmented governance, licensing issues, and inherent violence that were problematic (IOC News, 2018; Segerra, 2019). Despite the rhetoric precluding esports from becoming an Olympic sport in its current context, steps have been taken to set the stage for future inclusion.
For one, the International Esports Federation (IeSF), which works with 54 national esports federations around the world, has made formal applications and appeals with both the IOC and the GAISF for official recognition. In 2016, the federation received correspondence from the IOC outlining the evaluation process and next steps for esports to be considered as a recognized Olympic sport in the same manner as surfing, rock climbing, and other recent additions to the cadre of events (Polacek, 2016).
Despite the setback with the IeSF not being officially recognized, esports has been a topic at major international meetings, including the 2017 Olympic Summit (IOC News, 2017). The IOC and GAISF co-hosted an esports forum involving over 150 industry representatives, which led to the formation of an esports liaison group with a platform at the GAISF International Federations forum, the Associations of the National Olympic Committees General Assembly, and future IOC Olympic Summits (IOC News, 2018).
Possibly the greatest support for esports as a possible future Olympic event is its inclusion as a medal sport at the 2022 Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia. The Asian Games are a continental event recognized by the IOC. The Asian Electronic Sports Federation (AESF) is recognized by the Olympic Council of Asia, which governs the Asian Games.
While continental Games typically include nonmainstream sports that are germane to a geographic region (e.g., canoe polo and esports were a demonstration sport at the 2018 Asian Games), it is problematic to identify competitive gaming as a potential Olympic sport (“AESF Confirms,” 2018). However, discussions are emerging for inclusion of esports as an exhibition event, either at the 2024 Paris Olympics, likely in a restricted format, or through “virtual and connected” events preceding the Games and resembling online versions of existing sport such as sailing (Chao, 2017; Lanier, 2018; Morgan, 2019).
There is moderate anticipation that esports may one day be governed by a recognized international federation, whether it is the IeSF or another organization. In the meantime, there appear to be insurmountable hurdles to clear before esports would be considered a potential true Olympic sport.
What is leadership in sport organizations?
By Bonnie Tiell and Kelley Walton
Leadership Styles
Leadership style is the way leaders provide direction and motivate others. The styles proposed by Lewin, Lippet, and White (1939), Chelladurai (1978, 1984), and Goleman (2000) continue to resonate in the study of leadership and its application to the sports industry.
Classic Leadership Styles
Lewin et al. (1939) proposed that leaders demonstrate one of three styles of leadership: authoritarian, participative, or laissez-faire. These styles are generally used to describe the ways individuals lead, but as contingency theories suggest, a leader may select among the different styles for different audiences and situations.
The authoritarian, authoritative, or autocratic leader uses strong, directive actions to control the rules, regulations, activities, and relationships in the work environment. An autocratic leader often provides specific instructions or orders for achieving a task and rarely gives followers any authority in the choice of methods. The autocratic style has also been referred to as a militaristic or dictator style of leadership common to many elite Division I football and men's basketball coaches.
The participative style is exhibited by leaders who are considered fair and egalitarian and who involve others in decision making. Examples might include the sports professionals who serve as executives for national and global organizations (e.g., IOC, NCAA). The participative leadership style has also been described as a democratic style.
The laissez-faire or free-reign leadership style is exhibited by those who have little interaction with subordinates. As contingency leadership theories suggest, it is a style that may be most appropriate if a leader is supported by a competent and experienced staff in routine situations. For example, the executive director of a municipal recreation department with oversight for all summer camps may use a laissez-faire approach to supervise the youth sport director who has successfully organized the camp for the past seven years.
Multidimensional Leadership Style
Chelladurai (1978), a distinguished scholar in sport management, developed a multidimensional leadership model based on Lewin et al.'s three traditional styles. The model blends instructional behaviors (training), motivation tendencies, and two of Lewin's decision-making styles. The convergence of factors facilitates the choice of the best authoritative or participative leadership style based on the characteristics of the leader, situational characteristics, and the follower's “preferred” leadership behavior. Similar to the contingency theories on leadership, the result is a behavioral style that is best suited to the context of the situation. The multidimensional model suggests that effective leaders are those who can effectively modify their leadership style to meet the needs of the situation and the audience.
Contemporary Leadership Styles
Dan Goleman (2000), the authority on emotional and social intelligence, expanded on Lewin et al.'s model to develop six types of leadership styles: (1) coercive, (2) authoritative, (3) affiliative, (4) democratic, (5) pacesetting, and (6) coaching.
Goleman's approach to the field of leadership is postmodern and pragmatic. The researcher equates leadership styles with a set of golf clubs. Lower-handicap golfers instinctively know exactly which club to pull out in a given situation and are adept at using more than one (Goleman, 2000). Similarly, effective leaders with a governing role in sports can successfully employ a given style when necessary to obtain the desired results.
Goleman's work suggests the advantage to sport organizations of employing people who are strong in a particular leadership style that can compensate for deficiencies of the owner or other top authority. Table 2.5 provides a definition of each leadership style and an application of each to governing associations in the sport industry.
Digital and emerging media in sports
By Galen Clavio and Matthew Zimmerman
Sport media operate as a subset of the broader news and entertainment media, and that has been true in both traditional media and in digital and emerging media. As social networks emerged in the early part of the 21st century, sports played varying roles in the development of content and consumers. In some cases, sport media developed their own niches, and occasionally sport media acted as a leading audience attraction on certain media platforms.
The sport media industry is similar to other media sectors that are evolving from a physical domain to a digital economy, where consumers often create and publish their own content. This self-publishing landscape is filled with major challenges for governance issues related to illegal file sharing, piracy, and copyright infringement, whether intentional or accidental.
According to a Bloomberg report, there are over 20 million requests a week on Google web search engines to remove web links to copyright-protected material (Mola & Ovide, 2016). In 2016, a central repository noted complaints of copyright infringement applicable to over 1.5 billion websites (Mola & Ovide, 2016). According to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, companies are required to remove copyrighted material belonging to the rightful owner. When receiving notices of copyright violations, large Internet companies such as Facebook and YouTube often proceed to remove content without seeking permission from the person who published the material.
Due to the newness of digital and emerging media, traditional governance structures such as those found in broadcast and print ownership rules enforced by governments have not yet developed. Instead, the governance of these new media environments has been dictated by industry trends, audience affinities, and the suitability of certain technologies.
Net Neutrality
Complicating the sport media landscape even further has been the advent of high-speed Internet and mobile connectivity, the accompanying growth of social media, and online consumption of news and entertainment. While the World Wide Web was introduced in 1992, the importance of online sport media was minimal at best for the first 15 or so years following that date. Internet connections were slow, desktop-bound, and lacking infrastructure, since nearly all major aspects of sport media were still focused on traditional media channels such as printed newspapers, magazines, radio, and television.
However, the widespread growth of high-speed Internet in the early 2000s improved the quality and variety of available media content that consumers could access digitally. Instead of dial-up modem speeds restricting stories to words and an occasional photograph, high-speed Internet allowed for the transmission of data-rich media content such as audio and video.
By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, mobile devices had further enhanced the attractiveness of online sport media. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 (Silver, 2018) created a new world for sport media, one where pictures, sounds, and videos were not only digitally accessible, but portable. As sales of the iPhone and its competitor phones spiked over the next decade, digital sport media in all forms became increasingly important to consumers and media companies alike. Organizations asserted regulations such as blogging policies and social network guidelines to monitor the online behavior of employees (Linke & Zerfass, 2013).
During the 2010s, a policy debate developed concerning the way in which Internet service providers and cellular phone companies should be required to handle the transmission of data. The net neutrality conversation has confused a great many people, often because of deliberate misinformation spread by parties to the debate.
In simple terms, the concept of net neutrality is that all data should be treated equally on the Internet by Internet service providers (ISPs) and that companies should not be allowed to favor certain types of content, or content from certain providers, over content provided by others. Supporters of net neutrality argue that this equality of content has been a building block of the success of digital media over its first few decades of development, with consumers able to access data across platforms and content providers with ease. Internet service providers and major content providers, however, have argued that net neutrality stifles innovation and consumer choice (Geller, 2015).
Net neutrality affects sport media in important ways. Access to any digital sport media content is made through an ISP, either via a high-speed Internet subscription or through a mobile phone data plan. The absence of net neutrality creates the possibility that one of these data providers could choose to block or restrict access to another company's content because it rivals the content being provided by that data company or its business partners. Hypothetically, the lack of net neutrality protections could allow a company like Verizon as a mobile data provider to partner with the NFL and allow privileged status to streaming video from that entity, while throttling or restricting access by consumers to streaming video from other professional leagues.
The FCC's position on net neutrality became a highly partisan issue during the last half of the 2010s, with a Barack Obama administration-appointed FCC chairman designating the Internet as a public telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (Ruiz, 2015). Two years later, a Donald Trump administration-appointed FCC chairman moved to roll back those protections, with the repeal of those rules taking effect in 2018.
It is uncertain what the future holds for net neutrality, but it is worth noting that sport media entities continue to expand into the digital media space, with large organizations such as ESPN launching subscription streaming services containing access to wide swaths of content (Ha, 2019). As streaming services continue to expand, particular media and entertainment trends have become apparent. These market trends are described in table 9.4.
Esports and the Olympic Games
By Steve Borawski, Michael Kidd, and Bonnie Tiell
Governance in Action 14.2
An international federation is the cornerstone of global governance for traditional sports ranging from cycling, ice hockey, and softball to more obscure sports such as samba, lifesaving, and chess. The Global Association of International Sport Federations (GAISF) includes over 100 Olympic and non-Olympic sport federations, but entering 2020, there was no recognition of a federation for esports.
According to the Olympic Charter, without a universally recognized independent, nongovernmental international federation, esports is not eligible for consideration as an Olympic event. The IOC concluded that there was currently no organization representing esports globally that aligned with the Olympic movement, with officials citing fragmented governance, licensing issues, and inherent violence that were problematic (IOC News, 2018; Segerra, 2019). Despite the rhetoric precluding esports from becoming an Olympic sport in its current context, steps have been taken to set the stage for future inclusion.
For one, the International Esports Federation (IeSF), which works with 54 national esports federations around the world, has made formal applications and appeals with both the IOC and the GAISF for official recognition. In 2016, the federation received correspondence from the IOC outlining the evaluation process and next steps for esports to be considered as a recognized Olympic sport in the same manner as surfing, rock climbing, and other recent additions to the cadre of events (Polacek, 2016).
Despite the setback with the IeSF not being officially recognized, esports has been a topic at major international meetings, including the 2017 Olympic Summit (IOC News, 2017). The IOC and GAISF co-hosted an esports forum involving over 150 industry representatives, which led to the formation of an esports liaison group with a platform at the GAISF International Federations forum, the Associations of the National Olympic Committees General Assembly, and future IOC Olympic Summits (IOC News, 2018).
Possibly the greatest support for esports as a possible future Olympic event is its inclusion as a medal sport at the 2022 Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia. The Asian Games are a continental event recognized by the IOC. The Asian Electronic Sports Federation (AESF) is recognized by the Olympic Council of Asia, which governs the Asian Games.
While continental Games typically include nonmainstream sports that are germane to a geographic region (e.g., canoe polo and esports were a demonstration sport at the 2018 Asian Games), it is problematic to identify competitive gaming as a potential Olympic sport (“AESF Confirms,” 2018). However, discussions are emerging for inclusion of esports as an exhibition event, either at the 2024 Paris Olympics, likely in a restricted format, or through “virtual and connected” events preceding the Games and resembling online versions of existing sport such as sailing (Chao, 2017; Lanier, 2018; Morgan, 2019).
There is moderate anticipation that esports may one day be governed by a recognized international federation, whether it is the IeSF or another organization. In the meantime, there appear to be insurmountable hurdles to clear before esports would be considered a potential true Olympic sport.
What is leadership in sport organizations?
By Bonnie Tiell and Kelley Walton
Leadership Styles
Leadership style is the way leaders provide direction and motivate others. The styles proposed by Lewin, Lippet, and White (1939), Chelladurai (1978, 1984), and Goleman (2000) continue to resonate in the study of leadership and its application to the sports industry.
Classic Leadership Styles
Lewin et al. (1939) proposed that leaders demonstrate one of three styles of leadership: authoritarian, participative, or laissez-faire. These styles are generally used to describe the ways individuals lead, but as contingency theories suggest, a leader may select among the different styles for different audiences and situations.
The authoritarian, authoritative, or autocratic leader uses strong, directive actions to control the rules, regulations, activities, and relationships in the work environment. An autocratic leader often provides specific instructions or orders for achieving a task and rarely gives followers any authority in the choice of methods. The autocratic style has also been referred to as a militaristic or dictator style of leadership common to many elite Division I football and men's basketball coaches.
The participative style is exhibited by leaders who are considered fair and egalitarian and who involve others in decision making. Examples might include the sports professionals who serve as executives for national and global organizations (e.g., IOC, NCAA). The participative leadership style has also been described as a democratic style.
The laissez-faire or free-reign leadership style is exhibited by those who have little interaction with subordinates. As contingency leadership theories suggest, it is a style that may be most appropriate if a leader is supported by a competent and experienced staff in routine situations. For example, the executive director of a municipal recreation department with oversight for all summer camps may use a laissez-faire approach to supervise the youth sport director who has successfully organized the camp for the past seven years.
Multidimensional Leadership Style
Chelladurai (1978), a distinguished scholar in sport management, developed a multidimensional leadership model based on Lewin et al.'s three traditional styles. The model blends instructional behaviors (training), motivation tendencies, and two of Lewin's decision-making styles. The convergence of factors facilitates the choice of the best authoritative or participative leadership style based on the characteristics of the leader, situational characteristics, and the follower's “preferred” leadership behavior. Similar to the contingency theories on leadership, the result is a behavioral style that is best suited to the context of the situation. The multidimensional model suggests that effective leaders are those who can effectively modify their leadership style to meet the needs of the situation and the audience.
Contemporary Leadership Styles
Dan Goleman (2000), the authority on emotional and social intelligence, expanded on Lewin et al.'s model to develop six types of leadership styles: (1) coercive, (2) authoritative, (3) affiliative, (4) democratic, (5) pacesetting, and (6) coaching.
Goleman's approach to the field of leadership is postmodern and pragmatic. The researcher equates leadership styles with a set of golf clubs. Lower-handicap golfers instinctively know exactly which club to pull out in a given situation and are adept at using more than one (Goleman, 2000). Similarly, effective leaders with a governing role in sports can successfully employ a given style when necessary to obtain the desired results.
Goleman's work suggests the advantage to sport organizations of employing people who are strong in a particular leadership style that can compensate for deficiencies of the owner or other top authority. Table 2.5 provides a definition of each leadership style and an application of each to governing associations in the sport industry.
Digital and emerging media in sports
By Galen Clavio and Matthew Zimmerman
Sport media operate as a subset of the broader news and entertainment media, and that has been true in both traditional media and in digital and emerging media. As social networks emerged in the early part of the 21st century, sports played varying roles in the development of content and consumers. In some cases, sport media developed their own niches, and occasionally sport media acted as a leading audience attraction on certain media platforms.
The sport media industry is similar to other media sectors that are evolving from a physical domain to a digital economy, where consumers often create and publish their own content. This self-publishing landscape is filled with major challenges for governance issues related to illegal file sharing, piracy, and copyright infringement, whether intentional or accidental.
According to a Bloomberg report, there are over 20 million requests a week on Google web search engines to remove web links to copyright-protected material (Mola & Ovide, 2016). In 2016, a central repository noted complaints of copyright infringement applicable to over 1.5 billion websites (Mola & Ovide, 2016). According to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, companies are required to remove copyrighted material belonging to the rightful owner. When receiving notices of copyright violations, large Internet companies such as Facebook and YouTube often proceed to remove content without seeking permission from the person who published the material.
Due to the newness of digital and emerging media, traditional governance structures such as those found in broadcast and print ownership rules enforced by governments have not yet developed. Instead, the governance of these new media environments has been dictated by industry trends, audience affinities, and the suitability of certain technologies.
Net Neutrality
Complicating the sport media landscape even further has been the advent of high-speed Internet and mobile connectivity, the accompanying growth of social media, and online consumption of news and entertainment. While the World Wide Web was introduced in 1992, the importance of online sport media was minimal at best for the first 15 or so years following that date. Internet connections were slow, desktop-bound, and lacking infrastructure, since nearly all major aspects of sport media were still focused on traditional media channels such as printed newspapers, magazines, radio, and television.
However, the widespread growth of high-speed Internet in the early 2000s improved the quality and variety of available media content that consumers could access digitally. Instead of dial-up modem speeds restricting stories to words and an occasional photograph, high-speed Internet allowed for the transmission of data-rich media content such as audio and video.
By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, mobile devices had further enhanced the attractiveness of online sport media. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 (Silver, 2018) created a new world for sport media, one where pictures, sounds, and videos were not only digitally accessible, but portable. As sales of the iPhone and its competitor phones spiked over the next decade, digital sport media in all forms became increasingly important to consumers and media companies alike. Organizations asserted regulations such as blogging policies and social network guidelines to monitor the online behavior of employees (Linke & Zerfass, 2013).
During the 2010s, a policy debate developed concerning the way in which Internet service providers and cellular phone companies should be required to handle the transmission of data. The net neutrality conversation has confused a great many people, often because of deliberate misinformation spread by parties to the debate.
In simple terms, the concept of net neutrality is that all data should be treated equally on the Internet by Internet service providers (ISPs) and that companies should not be allowed to favor certain types of content, or content from certain providers, over content provided by others. Supporters of net neutrality argue that this equality of content has been a building block of the success of digital media over its first few decades of development, with consumers able to access data across platforms and content providers with ease. Internet service providers and major content providers, however, have argued that net neutrality stifles innovation and consumer choice (Geller, 2015).
Net neutrality affects sport media in important ways. Access to any digital sport media content is made through an ISP, either via a high-speed Internet subscription or through a mobile phone data plan. The absence of net neutrality creates the possibility that one of these data providers could choose to block or restrict access to another company's content because it rivals the content being provided by that data company or its business partners. Hypothetically, the lack of net neutrality protections could allow a company like Verizon as a mobile data provider to partner with the NFL and allow privileged status to streaming video from that entity, while throttling or restricting access by consumers to streaming video from other professional leagues.
The FCC's position on net neutrality became a highly partisan issue during the last half of the 2010s, with a Barack Obama administration-appointed FCC chairman designating the Internet as a public telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (Ruiz, 2015). Two years later, a Donald Trump administration-appointed FCC chairman moved to roll back those protections, with the repeal of those rules taking effect in 2018.
It is uncertain what the future holds for net neutrality, but it is worth noting that sport media entities continue to expand into the digital media space, with large organizations such as ESPN launching subscription streaming services containing access to wide swaths of content (Ha, 2019). As streaming services continue to expand, particular media and entertainment trends have become apparent. These market trends are described in table 9.4.
Esports and the Olympic Games
By Steve Borawski, Michael Kidd, and Bonnie Tiell
Governance in Action 14.2
An international federation is the cornerstone of global governance for traditional sports ranging from cycling, ice hockey, and softball to more obscure sports such as samba, lifesaving, and chess. The Global Association of International Sport Federations (GAISF) includes over 100 Olympic and non-Olympic sport federations, but entering 2020, there was no recognition of a federation for esports.
According to the Olympic Charter, without a universally recognized independent, nongovernmental international federation, esports is not eligible for consideration as an Olympic event. The IOC concluded that there was currently no organization representing esports globally that aligned with the Olympic movement, with officials citing fragmented governance, licensing issues, and inherent violence that were problematic (IOC News, 2018; Segerra, 2019). Despite the rhetoric precluding esports from becoming an Olympic sport in its current context, steps have been taken to set the stage for future inclusion.
For one, the International Esports Federation (IeSF), which works with 54 national esports federations around the world, has made formal applications and appeals with both the IOC and the GAISF for official recognition. In 2016, the federation received correspondence from the IOC outlining the evaluation process and next steps for esports to be considered as a recognized Olympic sport in the same manner as surfing, rock climbing, and other recent additions to the cadre of events (Polacek, 2016).
Despite the setback with the IeSF not being officially recognized, esports has been a topic at major international meetings, including the 2017 Olympic Summit (IOC News, 2017). The IOC and GAISF co-hosted an esports forum involving over 150 industry representatives, which led to the formation of an esports liaison group with a platform at the GAISF International Federations forum, the Associations of the National Olympic Committees General Assembly, and future IOC Olympic Summits (IOC News, 2018).
Possibly the greatest support for esports as a possible future Olympic event is its inclusion as a medal sport at the 2022 Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia. The Asian Games are a continental event recognized by the IOC. The Asian Electronic Sports Federation (AESF) is recognized by the Olympic Council of Asia, which governs the Asian Games.
While continental Games typically include nonmainstream sports that are germane to a geographic region (e.g., canoe polo and esports were a demonstration sport at the 2018 Asian Games), it is problematic to identify competitive gaming as a potential Olympic sport (“AESF Confirms,” 2018). However, discussions are emerging for inclusion of esports as an exhibition event, either at the 2024 Paris Olympics, likely in a restricted format, or through “virtual and connected” events preceding the Games and resembling online versions of existing sport such as sailing (Chao, 2017; Lanier, 2018; Morgan, 2019).
There is moderate anticipation that esports may one day be governed by a recognized international federation, whether it is the IeSF or another organization. In the meantime, there appear to be insurmountable hurdles to clear before esports would be considered a potential true Olympic sport.
What is leadership in sport organizations?
By Bonnie Tiell and Kelley Walton
Leadership Styles
Leadership style is the way leaders provide direction and motivate others. The styles proposed by Lewin, Lippet, and White (1939), Chelladurai (1978, 1984), and Goleman (2000) continue to resonate in the study of leadership and its application to the sports industry.
Classic Leadership Styles
Lewin et al. (1939) proposed that leaders demonstrate one of three styles of leadership: authoritarian, participative, or laissez-faire. These styles are generally used to describe the ways individuals lead, but as contingency theories suggest, a leader may select among the different styles for different audiences and situations.
The authoritarian, authoritative, or autocratic leader uses strong, directive actions to control the rules, regulations, activities, and relationships in the work environment. An autocratic leader often provides specific instructions or orders for achieving a task and rarely gives followers any authority in the choice of methods. The autocratic style has also been referred to as a militaristic or dictator style of leadership common to many elite Division I football and men's basketball coaches.
The participative style is exhibited by leaders who are considered fair and egalitarian and who involve others in decision making. Examples might include the sports professionals who serve as executives for national and global organizations (e.g., IOC, NCAA). The participative leadership style has also been described as a democratic style.
The laissez-faire or free-reign leadership style is exhibited by those who have little interaction with subordinates. As contingency leadership theories suggest, it is a style that may be most appropriate if a leader is supported by a competent and experienced staff in routine situations. For example, the executive director of a municipal recreation department with oversight for all summer camps may use a laissez-faire approach to supervise the youth sport director who has successfully organized the camp for the past seven years.
Multidimensional Leadership Style
Chelladurai (1978), a distinguished scholar in sport management, developed a multidimensional leadership model based on Lewin et al.'s three traditional styles. The model blends instructional behaviors (training), motivation tendencies, and two of Lewin's decision-making styles. The convergence of factors facilitates the choice of the best authoritative or participative leadership style based on the characteristics of the leader, situational characteristics, and the follower's “preferred” leadership behavior. Similar to the contingency theories on leadership, the result is a behavioral style that is best suited to the context of the situation. The multidimensional model suggests that effective leaders are those who can effectively modify their leadership style to meet the needs of the situation and the audience.
Contemporary Leadership Styles
Dan Goleman (2000), the authority on emotional and social intelligence, expanded on Lewin et al.'s model to develop six types of leadership styles: (1) coercive, (2) authoritative, (3) affiliative, (4) democratic, (5) pacesetting, and (6) coaching.
Goleman's approach to the field of leadership is postmodern and pragmatic. The researcher equates leadership styles with a set of golf clubs. Lower-handicap golfers instinctively know exactly which club to pull out in a given situation and are adept at using more than one (Goleman, 2000). Similarly, effective leaders with a governing role in sports can successfully employ a given style when necessary to obtain the desired results.
Goleman's work suggests the advantage to sport organizations of employing people who are strong in a particular leadership style that can compensate for deficiencies of the owner or other top authority. Table 2.5 provides a definition of each leadership style and an application of each to governing associations in the sport industry.