Organisational culture in sport

Organisational culture is present in the everyday operations of sports organisations, either strengthening or weakening their performance^[1]. Taking this fact into consideration, talented and well-educated leaders make attempts to exploit all the direct and indirect effects of strong organisational culture in order to improve the performance of teams. However, as everyday practice shows, sports leaders unfortunately rarely take advantage of this opportunity. In spite of this, the following positive examples prove that there are sports organisations that make use of certain elements of their organisational culture in a spontaneous way to improve individuals’ commitment and performance.

• Artefacts are the directly observable (tangible, audible, visible) elements of the culture of an organisation: the name, logo, emblem, crest and uniform of a team, its history, traditions, establishments (such as a stadium or a sports hall), its famous players, heroes (such as the Hall of Fame), its rules, organisational structure, routines, mottos and well-known sayings (such as the song entitled “You’ll never walk alone!’ – belonging to Liverpool F.C.) all belong to this category.
• The directly not observable elements of the culture of an organisation: the values, philosophy, norms, and assumptions (such as trust, satisfaction and commitment) of a team (club)

The following video provides an opportunity to identify almost all the above listed characteristics and artefacts that are typical of a strong organisational culture ­– in the present case those of Liverpool F. C.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq40rc7HM-M

To see another example, every newcomer at the Los Angeles Lakers, an American professional basketball team, receives a so-called playbook, which involves a compilation of basic strategies the team would like to use during games, right before the very first training takes place (what is more, the book contains several moves named after once famous players or coaches, which also strengthens a new player’s commitment and his feeling of “wenees”). In addition to this, the book also contains all the important information on the club such as its history, structure, hierarchy, traditions, and philosophy. This is an illustrative example of the existence of sports organisations relying on the effects of strong organisational culture^[2].

Taking into consideration what Kotter, Heskett, and Denison put into writing, we may conclude that organisational culture functions as a certain framework for an organisation to be able to reach high performance in a good atmosphere. It also enables new members to adhere to all the written and unwritten rules of their organisation; however, it is much more useful in the latter case. Furthermore, it has already been mentioned previously that organisational culture generally determines the systems of values and norms that the members are expected to believe in and act on, thus directly facilitating the emergence and maintenance of organisational trust. Doney et al. highlight that organisational culture contains all the appropriate beliefs, values, expectations, accepted behaviour, and faith related to trust (see Sass, 2005). The next section discusses some models that are applicable to the study of sports organisations.