Situational Distinctions in Organizations: The Case of Sport Facility Management

Abstract

The study describes Spanish sport facility managers' perceptions and evaluations of their job and organization in five functional areas: maintenance, operations, marketing, personnel, and finance. We asked the managers' perceptions of the frequency of task performance, presence of planning behavior, perceptions regarding the extent of decision making involvement, judgments regarding needed improvements in task performance, and perceptions regarding the level of troubleshooting in each of the different functional areas. Results indicated numerous differences between managers in private vs. public facilities. Using a more elaborate taxonomy, we were able to locate the organization situations with contrasting managerial practices more specifically. Managers perceive that they perform tasks in the five functional areas somewhat less than necessary; perform the tasks according to a plan, although planning varies considerably between them on most functions; they are directly involved in decision making; and they judge a general need for modest improvement in task performance. They also indicate that the performance problems entail troubleshooting activity since they are modestly problematic for effective organization functioning. We relate our findings to those of other studies on managers and point out future directions for research on sport facility managers' work, including collecting data on a longitudinal basis and across varying situations, e.g., countries.