اکتشاف ارزش های سهامداران: در جستجوی زمینه های مشترک در ورزش و توسعه ابتکار عمل بین المللی

The purpose of this study was to uncover the values of the Commonwealth Games Association's of Canada's international sport and development (IDS) initiative. Interviews were conducted with 39 key program stakeholders (e.g., IDS organizational leaders, host organizational leaders, intern alumni) involved in the management and operations of the initiative. Certain values were espoused by the organization through written documentation while others were perceived by stakeholders and were described as instrumental toward achieving desired end-states. In general, evidence of both congruent and incongruent values emerged through interview data. Nuance between stakeholder groups was also found, which in turn exposed areas of operations requiring further managerial attention. The complex interplay of values uncovered in this study contributes to the research on values in sport management and the emergent area of using sport as a means toward various developmental goals.

Our results provide some important insights into the role of fit between partner selection criteria and underlying motivational intentions and its effects on various outcomes of ISAs. Extant literature emphasizes the importance of structural prealliance formation factors, such as partner selection and goal congruency. Yet in explaining alliance success it neglects to incorporate these factors simultaneously in describing how to manage the alliance after formation. We therefore link prealliance formation factors to postalliance performance through the concept of fit. As a complement to previous studies (e.g., Gulati, 1995), we reveal that relational capital plays a crucial role in explaining and determining key alliance objectives, such as market development and learning. These relational antecedents play different (and often opposing) roles depending on the underlying intent and performance measurements and the type of fit influences these effects in significant ways. Consistent with RBV and TCE our findings suggest that competence similarity ensures better fit in terms of exploring new products and technologies (scope) but not necessarily for exploiting existing knowledge in new markets (scale). Thus, competence similarity appears to measure resource utilization or some sort of absorptive capacity rather than transaction cost-reducing efficiencies. This finding may help reconcile the mixed empirical results that emerge when complementarity appears as an independent variable in alliance studies. Specifically, we suggest that competence similarity and competence complementarity may be distinctive and future research should seek to account for both simultaneously when evaluating fit in ISAs. The finding that previous relationships have a negative effect on the upstream activities of the value chain, such as the sharing and development of new knowledge, seems pivotal, because firms tend to choose known partners to reduce their uncertainty and costs (e.g., Beckman et al., 2004). Yet our results point to the possibility of this tendency to hinder exploratory outcomes. This finding again underscores the need to select a partner on the basis of the intent underlying the alliance. By the same token, cultural distance relates negatively and significantly to exploitation fit but not to exploration fit, which indicates that the additional complexity associated with cultural distance may hamper effectiveness, yet it also could provide greater diversity of knowledge and perspectives from the foreign partner when exploration is the motive. Future research may benefit from investigating the cultural distance construct further while differentiating different types of motivation and performance measures in alliances. At a more fundamental level, our study challenges the ambidexterity hypothesis and responds to recent calls for more elaborate empirical research on organizational ambidexterity (e.g., O’Reilly and Tushman, 2008 and Raisch et al., 2009). Our empirical evidence offers a means to reconsider March's (1991) often cited but rarely tested ambidexterity hypothesis. Our empirical model verifies the existence of two distinct types of alliance fit; exploitation and exploration fit, that are the result of alignment of partner selection criteria and motivational intend underlying the alliance. Exploration fit and exploitation fit are potentially, but not necessarily, conflicting yet distinct strategies pursued by ISAs as evidenced by our results. Rather than treating exploration and exploitation as a continuum, such that more of one leads to less of the other, we argue that they represent fundamentally different objectives and intentions that result in different outcomes. Consequently, separate measures are required for both exploration and exploitation fit as well as for downstream and upstream performance. As such, we extend Lavie and Rosenkopf's (2006) work by linking exploration and exploitation fit explicitly to upstream and downstream performance in a cross-industry context. Theoretically, our study contributes to understanding of the complexity of fit in the context of strategic alliances by simultaneously considering partner selection criteria and motivational intend. Although we test several alternative models, further research should consider including other variables that might influence the dependent variables. For example, competence complementarity should be measured and included as discussed in a previous section. Also, mutual resource commitment could affect ISA upstream performance; conflict management practices likely influence learning in alliances (Kale et al., 2000) or alliance capability (Rothaermel & Deeds, 2006). A time lag between alliance formation and downstream performance is likely. Hence, future research may investigate various time intervals to provide a more nuanced picture of the balance between exploration fit and exploitation fit over time and domains (Lavie & Rosenkopf, 2006). Finally, further research should seek a better understanding of underlying, cross-level, cause-and-effect relationships pertaining to exploration fit and exploitation fit. The nested nature of interfirm relationships (Nielsen, 2010a) suggests that multilevel analyses of individual, group, firm, and interfirm interdependencies could advance our understanding of the interplay between exploration fit and exploitation fit in ISAs. For any individual leading an organization, managing a department, or working within a group setting, coming to know the values which guide members’ behavior and preferences for outcomes can inform him or her about the desirable or expected way of doing things (McShane and Steen, 2009 and Schein, 1990). Schein (1990) advanced that leaders have a fundamental role in shaping and reinforcing core values for the organization. Moreover, management researchers have called for the need to identify and understand how values shape behavior and inform managerial decision making (Anderson, 1997, Dolan and Garcia, 2002 and Hamm et al., 2008). Berger (1979) argued that one of the challenges of working in an international environment is coming to know the values which influence daily work life. When considering an intercultural setting, values may become a source of unification or one of possible conflict; thus, it is even more important for managers to have a sound grasp of the values which guide organizational behavior. Uncovering such values has been confirmed as critically important to the successful management and operations of organizations (Buchko, 2007, Dolan and Garcia, 2002, Offermann and Hellmann, 1997 and Schein, 1985). Values have been conceptualized as stable and evaluative beliefs, which describe desirable modes of behavior (Meglino & Ravlin, 1998). Indeed, knowing individuals’ values, particularly in cross-cultural settings where uncertainty regarding others’ attitudes may be amplified, may assist management in understanding the importance people place on certain outcomes and why they behave as they do (Berger, 1979, Meglino and Ravlin, 1998 and Schein, 1991). The shift in the business literature from Management by Objectives to Management by Values (cf., Dolan & Garcia, 2002) illustrates that values are essential to performance and success. Knowing that individuals’ values influence behavior, and that incongruence between values (i.e., between members, between a member and what the organization states) may have negative influences on individual and group level outcomes (Carmeli and Tishler, 2004, Drucker, 1999, Hamm et al., 2008 and MacIntosh and Doherty, 2005), further research on values may help explain the success or failure of various organizational initiatives. Consequently, the primary purpose of this study was to uncover the perceived (felt and enacted) values of key stakeholders of the IDS program. Key stakeholders were defined as those critical for the leadership and operations of this program (i.e., IDS program founders and leaders, host leaders, internship alumni). A secondary purpose was to describe the espoused (written statements) values of the organization in greater detail. Fulfilling these two purposes were meant to achieve a third purpose; that was to determine the value congruence between the values key stakeholders experienced and perceived as meaningful and the values that the organization espoused or stated. Research on delivery of sport programs designed to enhance development has been a recent focus in the sport management field (Coalter, 2007, Darnell, 2010, Hayhurst and Frisby, 2010 and Kidd, 2008). In this case study, we explored values within one sport-for-development program—namely the Commonwealth Games Association of Canada (CGC) international development through sport initiative—to fulfill on these three purposes. Although the CGC is principally involved in elite amateur sport, there is a division of this organization responsible for “international development through sport” (IDS). As such, a difference in focus within the organization itself, from its principle involvement, may produce incongruent values (or gaps). Such gaps are thought to create subcultures, which Martin (1992) explained can be a source of conflict (e.g., divergent philosophies between groups, poor communication) if not properly managed by leadership. To date, there remains a general lack of empirical work regarding the management of these types of IDS programs (Hayhurst and Frisby, 2010 and Kidd, 2008). Specifically, there is a dearth of research on the values which guide management behavior in sport and development settings. Evidence of organizational values generally, and the notion of congruent or incongruent values specifically, can assist management in guiding decision making for sport and development programs. Motivated by a desire to uncover the values due to the prominent role they have within organizational life and the relevance they have within an intercultural setting in particular, we make the argument that through case study research (cf., Posner & Schmidt, 1992), exploring key stakeholders’ values is an important starting point to understanding the foundation by which IDS programs operate. In this paper, we uncover the values which key stakeholders perceive as important to the CGC's IDS initiative. We articulate the perceptions of key stakeholders who are instrumental in partnering and delivering this IDS initiative and who thereby contribute largely to the values. It is important to note that values and the concept of organizational culture are both distinguishable and complementary (Hofstede, 1998) and that the focus of this study is on values within the IDS initiative rather than a description of organizational culture (i.e., artifacts, values, basic assumptions). In this study, we do not examine personal values in this setting; rather, we examine the core organizational values that stakeholders perceived and the organization espoused to view the existing congruency and incongruency within this IDS program. This study adds to the conversation relative to the theoretical importance of values within sport organizations and further extends the recent literature on IDS programs (e.g., Beutler, 2008, Bloyce et al., 2008, Hamm et al., 2008, Hayhurst and Frisby, 2010 and Meglino and Ravlin, 1998). In this paper, the concepts of values and value congruence within an organizational programmatic setting are reviewed and the prominent role that values have played in organizational culture research is noted. The concept of sport and development then follows, including a description of the IDS program under investigation, to enrich an understanding of the study's context. Details of the methodology used in this study are outlined and the results are presented and discussed. Practitioner implications of this research are also outlined and future research projects are suggested.

In the drive to use sport for development purposes, we must understand stakeholders’ values, take great care in acknowledging the complex and interwoven systems of how values are created, interpreted, and communicated, and pay attention to how they are managed within such IDS initiatives. Research on values and their management within IDS programming can continue to shed light on how to organize, communicate, and control the congruency between values so as to ultimately align with and carry out the strategic vision and mission of the organizations which facilitate such programs. It is sensible to begin expanding the research on values within cross-cultural settings so that we can further understand how they influence work related behavior for all stakeholders. Establishing some common ground (between stakeholders) may be central to better realizing outcomes related to IDS programming. Future research should begin to tease out the specific similarities and differences within intercultural settings in IDS initiatives. A call for more longitudinal studies is also warranted to arrive at a greater understanding of the terminal value of legacy.