Sport and Rec Mgmt: How Job Satisfaction & Org Commitment Affect Effectiveness - Essay Sample

Introduction

Sport and recreation management is a term that illustrates the comprehensive study of athletics in both professional, business, and collegiate as well as recreational contexts. Different attitudes in the workplace have a profound effect on a number of athletics activities and ultimately affect the effectiveness of the management of sports and recreation. Two of the many attitudes that impact management in these contexts include job satisfaction and organization commitment. Work attitudes encompass a collection of beliefs, thoughts, and feelings that tend to dictate how people behave in sports and towards their organizations. To begin with, job satisfaction involves a collection of beliefs and feelings that athletes, coaches, and even managers have about what they are professionally engaged in. Organizational commitment, on the other hand, involves those feeling and beliefs that athletes, coaches, and managers hold about their organizations as a whole (Lucidi, 2017). These attitudes are specific but not as lasting when compared to values.

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Job satisfaction is often determined by several factors that include a person’s personality, their intrinsic and extrinsic values as well as the work situation, and social influence. Sport and recreational management take all of these into consideration to ensure athletes and coaches get satisfied with what they do hence maximum output. A number of theories have been put in place to try and enable people, especially in sports and recreation, to understand what causes one athlete to be satisfied while another is dissatisfied. Organizational commitment allows athletes to identify with an organization and its goals and wish to maintain membership in the specific organization. Organizational commitment can be created by several antecedents, such as the communication style of leaders who include coaches and managers, among others, as well as the scope of the job and fairness of the organization.

All of these antecedents work to create strong relationships within different actors in an organization hence increases commitment. Organizational commitment is an attitude that can be rooted on bases such as emotional attachment or feelings of obligation. The attitudes in workplaces can also be anchored on the focus of commitment, and this can be the coach or teammates (Fabbri, 2019). The behavior, cognitive and affective components work together to dictate how different attitudes influence sport and recreation management in all the different contexts that come into play.

The attitudes of athletes and coaches not only affect how satisfied they are but also certain behaviors that directly influence their performance. From the discrepancy model, we get to see that people always compare what they do to some ideal that they hold from within, and this constant comparison affects their level of satisfaction. An example is when an athlete expected to have good pay, continuous improvement on skills, and proper administrative leadership. When what they receive is not in line with one or all of their ideals, they may feel dissatisfied, and hence their behavior can be affected, such as how they collaborate with teammates. Also, people’s attitudes towards specific behavior such as good sportsmanship will dictate how they behave in relation to it. Emotions and feelings tend to be unavoidable but affect the energy levels of athletes and coaches as well as other aspects of physical performance during training and competition. It shows just how essential attitudes impact the behavior of people in sports.

Getting to know the facets of training that athletes find important and useful help coaches ensure that athletes are satisfied. Also, it is crucial to understand what they expect to get from participating in the sport, as this allows the prediction of deliberate behavior, which stems from the various attitudes of the athletes. The physicality of training for athletes profoundly impacts their behavior towards a particular training. Hence, this affects the effectiveness of the training as well as the overall satisfaction of the athlete. The value-based theory of satisfaction helps us see the relationship between the value of the possible outcome and the comfort of workers such as athletes. It means that when an athlete values a training program and sees its ability to enable them to achieve high performance which ultimately leads to more pay and recognition. They tend to have good behavioral tendencies to that training program and eventually feel satisfied with it. The opposite is true when the value of a possible outcome is low.

Motivation also links attitudes and behavior by causing changes in beliefs and feelings, which translates directly to changes in behavior that may be positive or negative. Motivation can come from self-persuasion of an athlete that allows them to push themselves beyond certain limits to be better. Herzberg’s motivator-hygiene theory helps to stress this point of view because different needs requirements influence athletes and coaches positively or negatively. Appropriate behavior can also originate from the social influence that causes changes in the attitude of one athlete to conform with the others. To some degree, the behavior of teammates and coaches can impact attitudes and hence the behavior of another athlete (Matosic, 2016). Attitudes, such as organizational commitment, also impact the behavior of sportsmen and women concerning their organization. An example is when an athlete such as a basketballer is emotionally attached and feels obligated to achieve the objectives of their team. They always behave in ways that are in the best interest of their team or organization.

The commitment an athlete has to a coach can also influence supervision as well as performance because both the athlete and the coach will behave in positive ways that allow everyone to come out a winner. The equity theory affects the relationship between the attitudes of workers, such as athletes and their behavior. An example is when a player of one team learns that another player in the same team earns more money for the same job output, they may choose to do less training and even give little in a competition. It ultimately affects their satisfaction and level of commitment. Managers and even coaches need to identify what motivates each person under them and also what they value as this helps to create balance and fairness for all actors involved. It has been shown that attitudes affect behavior; hence leadership in sports should be transformational to allow for individual consideration, inspirational motivation, and idealized influence, which helps create good attitudes that lead to positive behavior.

In any sports arrangement, all the parties involved should have a mutual benefit in terms of reciprocity as the theory of social exchange dictates. For example, sportsmanship can only be displayed by athletes when they feel obligated to each other and their organizations. An unbalanced status may make it difficult for one party to make sacrifices for the greater good because they feel like the benefits are not worth the effort. In Sport and Recreation management, attitudes related to leadership, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction have profound effects on the behavior of athletes and, eventually, their performance. It becomes vital to have a deep understanding of the correlation that exists between attitudes and behavior. Several theories can be used to understand this relationship to strengthen it objectively. When attitudes are flawed and inconsistent, then the behavior of people in sports becomes unpredictable and hard to anticipate, and this is bad for the proper management of sports and recreation as well as in any organization.

References

Fabbri, T., Scapolan, A. C., Bertolotti, F., & Canali, C. (2019). HR Analytics in the Digital Workplace: Exploring the Relationship between Attitudes and Tracked Work Behaviors. In HRM 4.0 For Human-Centered Organizations. Emerald Publishing Limited.

Lucidi, F., Zelli, A., Mallia, L., Nicolais, G., Lazuras, L., & Hagger, M. S. (2017). Moral attitudes predict cheating and gamesmanship behaviors among competitive tennis players—frontiers in psychology, 8, 571.

Matosic, D., Ntoumanis, N., Boardley, I. D., Stenling, A., & Sedikides, C. (2016). Linking narcissism, motivation, and doping attitudes in sport: A multilevel investigation involving coaches and athletes. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 38(6), 556-566.