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A New Pitch: Building an Innovative Sport Organization Through Sport Employees

Nathan Baer, Claire C. Zvosec, Brent D. Oja, and Minjung Kim

Ben Davis has recently been hired to take over as the president of business operations for Major League Baseball’s newest expansion club, the Nashville Comets. He is faced with a challenging task: filling out the rest of his senior management staff. Ben knows he needs to meet certain initiatives set by the ownership group. Of these, the most important is that the ownership team wants to build an organization that will set itself apart in the crowded Nashville entertainment market, allowing it to flourish in the long term. While consulting with some of his industry colleagues, Ben has honed in on innovation, job crafting, and meaningful work as a means of doing so. Ben is seeking to develop an organization that inspires innovation in its employees, maximizing his staff as a resource for change. Using concepts like meaningful work and job crafting, students will be tasked with assisting Ben in fleshing out the Comets’ front office in a way that fosters creativity and innovation among their employees, contributing to the success of the organization.

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Major Sport Events and Psychic Income: The Social Anchor Effect

Brent D. Oja, Henry T. Wear, and Aaron W. Clopton

To better understand the intangible impacts on host communities of major sport events, the psychic income of local residents was examined. In addition, social anchor theory was applied to potentially better explain the lasting intangible benefits of hosting the event. The impetus of the study came from the 2012 Major League Baseball All-Star Game, held in Kansas City, MO. Data were collected from local community organizations before and after the event. The results suggest that some components of psychic income dissipated after the event, whereas other components did not significantly change. Furthermore, social capital increased, but neighborhood identity decreased after the event. As such, the event as a social anchor was unable to sustain residents’ psychic income after the event. Potential limitations and future research directions are also offered.

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Exploring Sport Employees’ Conceptualizations of Meaningful Work

Nathan R. Baer, Claire C. Zvosec, and Brent D. Oja

Modern sport management scholars have paired the fields of positive organizational behavior and human resource development with sport management to enhance the productivity of sport organizations through their employees. One area of study receiving increased attention is meaningful work, an emerging employee well-being metric whose definition is debated. The purpose of this study was to explore the ways in which sport employees conceptualize meaningful work. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 32 sport employees. The following themes were identified: meaningful work is work that serves, meaning gained from sport organizations, and individual meaningful work experiences. Discussion offers valuable implications for practitioners of sport management, as well as the emerging scholarly field of human resource development in sport management, and the evolving discourse surrounding meaningful work.

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Developing Student-Athlete School Satisfaction and Psychological Well-Being: The Effects of Academic Psychological Capital and Engagement

Minjung Kim, Brent D. Oja, Han Soo Kim, and Ji-Hyoung Chin

The quality of a student-athlete’s experience can be a product of the services provided by their sponsoring sport organization. In an attempt to improve the student-athlete experience, this study was positioned to examine how collegiate sport services could use academic psychological capital (PsyCap) and student-athlete engagement to promote school satisfaction and psychological well-being. A total of 248 National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I student-athletes participated in this study. Results indicated that academic classification moderated academic PsyCap’s influence on engagement. In addition, the academic PsyCap of the student-athletes positively influenced school satisfaction and psychological well-being, but student-athlete engagement fully mediated the relationship between academic PsyCap and psychological well-being. This empirical evidence provides new knowledge on the relationships among student-athletes’ motivational cognitive constructs, educational engagement, school satisfaction, and psychological well-being in the context of highly competitive collegiate sports. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, including incorporating the results with services provided to student-athletes.

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An Examination of Sport Management Doctoral Programs and the Organizational Environment Through Person–Environment Fit Theory

Jay Martyn, Kyle J. Brannigan, Brent D. Oja, and Claire C. Zvosec

Scholarly literature focusing on organizational environments and organizational fit highlights the importance of a Multi-Fit perspective, which includes person–environment fit, person–culture fit, and person–vocation fit. However, relatively few scholars in sport management have focused on the organizational environment that includes sport management faculty and doctoral students. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine sport management doctoral programs to evaluate how sport management faculty and sport management doctoral students assessed the academic environment. Findings from 15 sport management faculty and 13 doctoral students resulted in three distinct overarching themes: (a) initial evaluations from person–environment fit, (b) fitting in with person–culture fit, and (c) the gap in person–culture fit. Moreover, subthemes emerging from faculty were (a) coachable, (b) well-roundedness, (c) experience, (d) research interests, and (e) statistical knowledge. Subthemes emerging from sport management doctoral students were (a) funding, (b) initial contact, (c) geography, (d) foundation, and (e) cohort mentality. The findings of this study have significant importance to the sport management academy as scholars have suggested approximately 50% of doctoral students fail to receive their degree, and cohort entrance and exit attrition may be as high as 85%. Therefore, the goal of this study was to increase the extant knowledge pertaining to person–environment fit and the sport management doctoral matriculation and enrollment process between sport management faculty and sport management doctoral students.

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The Roles of Perceived Safety Climate and Innovativeness in the Performance of Sport and Recreation Organizations

Minjung Kim, Han Soo Kim, Brent D. Oja, Jasamine Hill, Claire Zvosec, and Paul Yuseung Doh

The recent COVID-19 pandemic created an unpredictable environment regarding the safety operations of sport and recreation organizations. This study was designed to examine how safety climate and organizational innovativeness could promote preferred organizational behavior outcomes in college campus sport and recreation centers. A total of 227 sport and recreation employees were recruited through the National Intramural and Recreational Sports Association. With the collected data, we employed structural equation modeling to assess the research hypotheses. The results indicated that safety climate and innovativeness positively influenced job engagement, therefore leading to enhanced safety compliance and employee innovativeness, which ultimately resulted in higher levels of organizational performance. Peer safety compliance was also found to be a moderator in the relationship between job engagement and safety compliance. In this study, the authors offer new insights into sport organizational performance by emphasizing safety and innovation.