Human resources management in professional soccer organizations

HRM and Soccer

Managing People on and off the Field

We are accustomed to associating the practice of human resources management with large corporations or at least medium-sized companies. However, as human resources management has become increasingly sophisticated and comprehensive over the last decade, the tools of the trade have become increasingly useful and even necessary in fields far away from their original purposes. Human resources management, once highly peripheral to the main focus of a company or other organization, is now a central force in creating and maintaining a healthy organization.

This paper examines one of those fields that have become increasingly dependent on human resources management: The field of sports and recreation management, specifically as it is used in soccer, one of the most popular sports in the world and one that must face the challenges of other major sports, including the great disparity in pay and privilege between the stars and other players, problems with drug use, a "workforce" extraordinarily susceptible to injury, and a sports tradition that has encouraged what can only be described as unsportsmanlike behavior much of the time, not only against opponents but against teammates as well.

Professional sports have long been the province of flashy sports managers and team managers who were at least as concerned about their own image as their management skills. The switch to professional human resources managers can thus be seen as a shift to a more overall professional attitude towards sports, an attitude that is likely to improve the sports experience for both the athletes as well as the fans. However, countering this last point is the fact that organizations are generally resistant to change and sports organizations (like some other types of organizations in society, such as arts organization) and so the implementation of a fully professional mechanism for human resources management program more difficult than it is in other fields.

This does not mean that it is not possible to implement such a program but rather that anyone who engages in such a task must be prepared for a range of significant challenges far beyond his or her colleagues might be facing in other fields. This means that the field is both more challenging and potentially more rewarding, especially for those human resources managers who are concerned with the entire sports organization process, from recruitment, to training, to maintaining key balances in the team, to managing the public and its influences on team strategy.

Human Resources Management, Organizational Culture, and Sports

Another key function that the human resources manager performs is creating a healthy corporate culture. This might mean that the human resources manager might institute policies that discourage performance-enhancing drugs or that support athletes who perform volunteer work in their communities. A corporate culture can be understood as the way a company and its employees look at themselves as opposed to the face that they show to the rest of the world.

A healthy corporate culture is one in which the two versions of the corporation are the same, meaning that the organization has nothing to hide. As the headlines repeatedly show, this is not at all the kind of organizational culture that exists in the sports world. If it could be created and sustained in teams then the world of sports would be better for those within and without because the culture of the team would carry over to its fans.

Doherty (1998) summarizes this point, using the term "organizational behavior" in lieu of corporate or organizational culture:

Human resources, which are critical to organisational effectiveness, must be effectively managed. Human resource management relies on the ability to explain and predict organisational behaviour (OB), which is the attitudes and behaviours of individuals and groups in the organisation; their satisfaction, commitment, performance, and so on. OB research is directed toward identifying the determinants of these attitudes and behaviours, and further outcomes including organisational effectiveness. (p. 1)

Much of the apparent organizational strategy of sports teams would seem to circulate around money, with the assumption that the team with the most money and the stars who get the biggest chunk of that money are the best organizations (Li, 1993).

However, this depends entirely on how one conceptualizes the concept of "best" as it relates to a sports organization. The most obvious way to tell which team is best is simply looking at which team has won the most games, made it to the play-offs, won those play-offs. This is, of course, how most fans would go about determining the "best" team. However, what is not as clear to most fans, and probably even to many individuals who work within sports organizations, that the performance of athletes is very much tied to the basics of the human resources management skill and organization (Koehler, 1988).

What Really Makes the 'Best' Team?

Doherty (1998) explains more completely how athletic success and organizational structure and behavior (as implemented and supported by human resources management) are intimately link with team success:

OB refers to the attitudes and behaviours of individuals and groups in the organisation. How members feel about their pay, their commitment to the workgroup or organisation, their willingness to work overtime, and job performance are examples of important attitudes and behaviours in the workplace.

According to Ivancevich and Matteson (1996), "individual performance is the foundation of organizational performance" (p. 14). Koehler (1988) advises that "it should never be overlooked that the lifeline and energy of & #8230; organizations are lodged within individuals

[T]he "management of human resources becomes very critical because only people implement organizational policies and procedures. Further, money and material become resources only when people use them effectively in the production of goods and services"

The attitudes and behaviours of members are critical, and perhaps of particular concern, in difficult economic times when members are expected to do more with less.

The dependence of sport organisations on volunteers may increase the complexity of human resource management (HRM). The challenge is to direct organisation members towards those outcomes that will have a positive impact on organisational effectiveness. (p. 5)

Probably the most important point that Doherty is making in the above passage is that human resources management helps to create a sense that all of the members of an organization are valued and act in ways that make this belief concrete.

As noted above, the great disparity in pay and other rewards (such as sponsorships, fan adoration, fame, etc.) that exist in soccer and other teams requires a constant force opposing this sense of inequality (Lehnus & Miller, 1996). One of the ways in which human resources managers help to maintain the health of a soccer team or other sports organizations is by connecting the overall success of a team to the work of each individual. Again, this is a platitude often heard in management memos, but it is also one that is all-too-often given simply lip service (Ulrich, 1996, pp. 23-4).

Doherty (1998) warns against treating the idea that a team is made up and succeeds only when all of its members are used to their fullest extent and feel that they have a chance to improve in their roles and to be rewarded for that improvement, even if they never become the stars of the team. She lists these criteria as those that apply when one is describing the 'best' team. Absent from this description is any mention of the highest-scoring team. However, she (and the entire field of human resources managers) would agree that a successful team in the conventional sense (that is, one that has the 'winningest' record) are not made except through a careful human resources management of these factors:

Outcomes of the work environment can be distinguished at the individual, group, and organisational levels. At the individual and group levels the focus is on affective and behavioural outcomes.

Examples of affective outcomes of the work environment include (a) individual job satisfaction, an attitude based on the relationship between an organisation member's expectations of the job and what the job actually provides; (b) motivation, which is a member's willingness to exert effort on the job; (c) commitment, or a sense of identification, involvement and loyalty with respect to the organisation; (d) intrapersonal conflict, experienced when a member is faced with opposing expectations; and (e) stress and burnout. (Doherty, 1998, p. 23)

It should be clear that these goals apply to any well-run organization. But it should also be clear, as Doherty contends, that these qualities are especially important to instill and uphold within a sports organization.

Focus on the Specific Needs of Sports Teams

Chelladurai (2006) outlines the key elements that human resources management performs within the world of modern sports:

Differences among people and how the differences affect behavior in sport and recreation organizations, including human resource issues as they are evidenced in abilities, personality, values, and motivation.

Significant organizational processes in the management of human resources.

Organizational justice, a concept that is profoundly difficult to conceptualize and implement in a sports organization in which goals scored is an easy but not always fully accurate measure of the worth of an individual.

Job design, especially with a focus on the ways in which injury can at any moment end a career, reward systems, and internal marketing. Chelladurai (2006)

These tasks will seem predictable: The skills and tasks that we would expect human relations managers to have mastered and to put into practice -- with the possible exception of organizational justice. Indeed, one of the most profound challenges for human relations management is to be able to shift between the routine -- which constitutes about 80% of what human resources management performs -- and the extraordinary, which constitutes the other 20%. This is summarized in the following passage:

Probably about 80% of the decisions you make in personnel management fit into the category of routine. That doesn't mean they're easy, but it means they fall within fairly standard guidelines. That 80% can probably be handled without help & #8230; [as you] carry out your role as manager or supervisor, organized by employee life cycle. (http://hrweb.berkeley.edu/guides/managing-hr/preface)

This brings up one of the key ways in which human relations management in the arena of sports is different from human relations management in other professional fields: There is a much greater range of what passes for "routine" in sports organizations than in, for example, a paper supply company (Kikulis, 1990). This requires human relations managers in sports organizations to be far more flexible than they would need to be in other types of organizations (Human Resources, Training, and Labor Relations Managers and Specialists.)

Conclusion

One of the best and worst aspects of twenty-first century culture is that everything in the world is more and more closely related to each other. This means both that everything is more connected to everything else and also that everything is becoming more and more alike everything else. One clear example of this is the fact that human resources management is now a welcome part of organizations (in fact, a needed part) that would never have felt the need for such a level of professional management before (Merkle, 2010).

The above is in fact a description of both what is good and what is bad about society: We can count on a generally high level of professionalism (at least in the developed world), which makes life in general easier. However, it also ensures that our lives are less interesting, more homogenized. No matter where we go or what we do or what we like there seems to be essentially no choice. We're stuck with the McDonald's version of whatever field we work in or find our recreation in.

This is, ironically, one of the most important tasks that human resources managers have. Even as on the one hand they are responsible for creating an atmosphere of universal professionalism, they must also work to make their team seem unique, entirely different from every other team (which in fact it is structurally very similar to). One of the reasons that we as fans love our sports teams so much -- and there are no more enthusiastic teams in the world than the fans of soccer -- is that the teams give us a sense of being special. And this then is the final and most important task of team managers: To make us feel that everything that they do is just for us.