engleski

Managing sport organizations: A case of Croatian Judo Federation

The growth of published papers in the last 20 years illustrates well the attention that sport management gains in scholar and professional circles. Sport is characterized by a number of unique features which make sport management different from management of other economic activities. According to Hoye, Nicholson and Smith (2008) these unique features refer to sport consumer behavior, government relations, sport regulations, strategy in sport, organizational structure, human resources management, sport culture, sport governance and performance management. Many sport organizations around the world are undergoing change in terms of professionalization of management and introduction of management roles. While the dominant management culture in the past was the traditional culture of volunteer managers, management of sport organizations today requires numerous managerial skills and knowledge. Achieving the best sports results possible while at the same time using financial resources efficiently leads to the need for strategic planning methods and tools. Recent study about the assessment of Hellenic national sport federations (Karastathis, Afthinos, Gargalianos and Theodorakis 2014) also revealed the lack of studies in sport's sector on quality management and organizational performance management. Study findings revealed that processes of management's excellence do exist and are applied but neither often nor systematically. The majority of authors concluded about the need for further research to explore and thus facilitate the development of a new understanding and theory development within emerging field of sport management research (Webb, Rowlland and Fasano 1990 ; O'Boyle, Hassan 2014). Two studies conducted in Croatia (Škorić, 2011 ; Čorak, Boranić Živoder and Marušić 2014) discovered that many national sport federations as the main sport organizations in Croatia use only some management tools although the progress from 2011 to 2014 has been reported especially in the area of the implementation of strategic planning instruments. Based on the results of these studies, the goal of this paper is twofold: first, to define the most important management issues for sport federations and evaluate the activities of Croatian judo federation (CJF) according to level of use of those issues at the beginning and the end of the observed period (2005-2014). The evaluation has shown that all those strategic management issues do not completely explain the growth/development of the CJF. Theoretical framework that can be used and is giving a new insight in explanation of the work of CJF is the theory of learning organization (Senge 1990) that use the concepts of personal development, mental models, joint vision and team learning to describe and illustrate the behavior of organizations. For future research the authors suggest further investigation on use of the concept of team learning for sport organizations. Of course, the application of basic management concepts and techniques are prerequisite for success of not-for-profit sport organizations, especially national federations as umbrella organizations that still rely mostly on volonteer work.

sport management; national federations; strategic management in sport; learning organizations; Croatian judo federation

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