Physical inactivity is proven to be a risk factor for non-communicable diseases and all-cost mortality. Public health policy recommends community settings worldwide such as the workplace to promote physical activity. Despite the growing prevalence of workplace team sports, studies have not synthesised their benefits within the workplace. A systematic review was carried out to identify articles related to workplace team sports, including intervention, observational and qualitative studies. Eighteen studies met the inclusion criteria. The findings suggest team sport holds benefits not only for individual health but also for group cohesion and performance and organisational benefits such as the increased work performance. However, it is unclear how sport is most associated with these benefits as most of the studies included poorly described samples and unclear sports activities. Our review highlights the need to explore and empirically understand the benefits of workplace team sport for individual, group and organisational health outcomes. Researches carried out in this field must provide details regarding their respective samples, the sports profile and utilise objective measures (e.g., sickness absence register data, accelerometer data).
History
School
Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
Journal of Sports Sciences
Pages
1 - 13
Citation
BRINKLEY, A., MCDERMOTT, H. and MUNIR, F., 2017. What benefits does team sport hold for the workplace? A systematic review. Journal of Sports Sciences, 35 (2), pp. 136-148.
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
2017
Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Sports Sciences on 15 March 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/02640414.2016.1158852.