posted on 2016-03-17, 12:06authored bySteve Swanson, Aubrey Kent
Team identification has been researched extensively from the perspective of the consumer. The current study proposes that employees working in professional sport may also be fans of their respective teams, and provides insight on the role of team identification in the workplace environment. Over 1100 business operations employees from the top profession sports leagues in North America participated, and results indicate that dual targets of identification exist simultaneously in this setting. Strong support is provided for the discriminant validity between organizational and team identification. Beyond the more established effects of organizational identification, the results provide evidence that team identification independently predicts key outcomes such as commitment, satisfaction, and motivation. The results add to the literature by introducing the concept of a sports team as an additional target of identification in the organizational context.
History
School
Loughborough University London
Published in
Journal of Sport Management
Volume
29
Issue
4
Pages
461 - 477 (17)
Citation
SWANSON, S. and KENT, A., 2015. Fandom in the workplace: Multi-target identification in professional team sports. Journal of Sport Management, 29(4), pp. 461-477.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2015-01-31
Copyright date
2015
Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Journal of Sport Management and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1123/JSM.2014-0132