| Affiliations: | DeBakey Executive Research Leadership Program |
| Project Leader: | Anne Dietrich a.dietrich@tamu.edu Health & Kinesiology |
| Faculty Mentor: | Brian P. McCullough, Ph.D. |
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Meeting Times:
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TBD |
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Team Size:
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3
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| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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Gaining contacts and getting your name in the door with many big sports teams in the US and Europe. You’ll also gain practical experience in working on a (social science) research projects, and a great opportunity for building your resume
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Team Needs:
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We are looking for self-starting, determined and reliable candidates who are interested in working in areas such as sport management, sustainability, human resources, business, industrial psychology, among others. You should not be afraid to take initiative, step-up and follow leads or call or email people on behalf of the project. Lastly, being organized and the ability to keep record (e.g., who was already contacted, who replied, who needs following up) is a requirement |
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Description:
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Sport and nature exist in a two-way relationship. The environment is constantly shaped by sport event operations and building of new venues, while at the same time, athletes, teams and fans rely on a healthy the environment and strong community to facilitate outstanding sport events. In recent years, in addition to highlighting the positive aspects of sport for communities, negative aspects of the sport industry (e.g., unnecessary travel, vast amounts of waste generation and resource use) rose to the spotlight. As a result, an increasing number of teams and leagues established so-called corporate social responsibility (CSR) or sustainability manager positions, tasked to deal with these issues. Yet, we know anecdotally that people in these positions may have no or only limited knowledge of sustainability, managers may not receive the internal support required to bring about change, and the positions were mainly implemented for PR and marketing reasons. Thus, this current study aims to investigate the perceptions of sport sustainability managers about their role. Specifically, we aim to understand what barriers sustainability managers may face within and outside their organization, how this impacts their job satisfaction and performance. To do this, we already started to collect contact information of sport sustainability managers of all the major professional sport teams in the US (NFL, NBA, WNBA, NHL, MBL, MLS, NWSL) and Europe (Legue 1, Premier League, Serie A, La Liga, Bundesliga). In your role in this project, you will be tasked to continue this work. In a second step, we will test and send out a survey to the respective managers, assessing their perceived competence, roles and responsibilities, and job satisfaction. If you are passionate about sport, sustainability, human resource management or you are just curious about research and what it takes to make employees feel valued and competent in their position, this project is for you! At some times, the project might require more mundane data entry tasks; however, the majority of time you will interact with real individuals and gain exposure to work in the sport industry |