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The impact of sports teams on team performance management
Edited by Vanessa Ratten
1. Introduction
Coaches of sports teams are managers. While various models of management guide research on management and leadership, it is commonly accepted that managers perform some combination of Henri [17] Fayol's (1916) four functions:
planning;
organizing;
leading; and
controlling.
Coaches set practice schedules and devise strategies designed to defeat opponents (planning). They determine which players should be utilized and what roles those players should fulfill (organizing). Coaches try to maximize player performance and team cohesiveness by communicating with and motivating players (leading). Finally, coaches set performance standards for players, monitor performance statistics, and mete out sanctions to ensure that the team's performance and developmental goals are being met (controlling).
Professional coaches are ideal for scholarly study of leadership behavior for at least four reasons. First, because professional head coaches work in the public eye, they are unable to disguise or misrepresent their teams' performance. Second, there is ample media documentation of their performance. Third, all teams in a given sport have the same roles, structures, and tasks. Finally, with scholarship in this area increasing, we gain more knowledge upon which to base future research.
Analyzing coaches of sports teams, particularly those of professional sports teams, is a valuable way to gain insight into managerial behavior. Unlike corporations and other traditional organizational types, every performance of a sports team that matters occurs in the public eye. Consequently, there is no possibility of coaches engaging in the behavior of some of their corporate counterparts by "hiding" their losses ([8] Burns, 2006) or even strong performances ([6] Botosan and Stanford, 2005) in order to gain or maintain competitive advantage.
Because we live in a technological and media-driven age, easily accessible transcripts and video footage document these coaches' words on and off the field of play, before the game, and after the game. As a result, while we often cannot easily observe managers in traditional organizations engaging in their day-to-day work, we have a unique window into the behavior of these on-the-field managers.
Sports teams also exist within an ideal context for comparing managers and organizations because each team has the same roles, organizational structure, and consistently labeled personnel performing the same tasks ([21] Groysberg