Sports Management and Marketing

1654 Words4 Pages

Sports Management and Marketing

Management is tasks. Management is a discipline. But management is also people (Drucker, 1999) Management is a very broad term and has been given many different definitions. Smith and Stewart (1999) define it as ‘The system of planning, organising, actuating and controlling the co-ordination of resources for the efficient and effective delivery and exchange of products and services’ (p7). This definition incorporates 4 major principles that almost every definition will include. These 4 categories are compressed functions that G. R. Terry developed in 1960. They are planning, organising, actuating (leading) and controlling. This is a development of the 1916 description by Fayol who, instead of inserting actuating (leading), inserted command and coordinate. The Smith and Stewart (1999) definition includes the modern conception of human resource management. It considers people as individuals to lead instead of personnel management which identifies people as the collective to command. This type of management is implemented in many different organisations both sporting and in general business. Honda implements this notion and has an ethos where everyone in the organisation, from the cleaners to the CEO’s has a voice. They express this notion of individual importance in their slogan † ‘the power of dreams’. Leadership, therefore, is a very iconic part of management and is too vast an area to identify as a single behaviour. The term ‘leadership’ is often confused with ‘management’. Even within a work organisation you cannot identify a manager necessarily by a person’s job title (Mullins, 1999) but by the way they lead (Cole, 1999). A manager, therefore, is a title whereas leadership is a personality trait that a manager should possess. Leadership qualities can be broken down to sub categories or behaviours such as ‘communication’. Communication in the basic skill form is obviously invaluable to a manager’s success. Managers spend most of their time communicating by spoken, written or electronic means with their supervisors, peers, subordinates or customers (Mintzberg, 1973). The importance and differences in communication can be seen in most sporting contexts form football (where Jose Mourinho passed notes to his Chelsea players to communicate his instructions privately) to boxing (where the coach is ever present and vocal during the fight in their designated corner).Therefore it is clear that the continued development of this skill will ultimately underpin a successful manager (Boddy & Patton, 1998). This, however, is communication in its basic form.

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