抄録
Commercial sport and fitness clubs (CSFCs) are human service organizations (HSOs) run as businesses that produce and deliver quality sport services to sports consumers. Although such CSFCs are run as service businesses, a bureaucracy system has been applied to many sport management organizations. The purpose of this study was to examine and explain the phenomenon of the HSO in CSFCs as sport management organizations.
In order to pursue this purpose, the hypothetical construct of the “HSO orientation” was operationalized by a total of 50 statements categorized under five dimensions such as “flat hierarchy”, “empowerment”, “openness”, “innovativeness”, and “organizational learning”. Questionnaires containing the 50 statements were distributed to a total of 693 CSFC managers. Two hundred eighteen usable questionnaires were returned, resulting in a response rate of 31.5%. The statistical techniques employed to identify the overall HSO structure in CSFCs were Item-Total correlation analysis, factor analysis, principal component analysis, Cronbach’s reliability analysis, and t-test.
The main findings are summarized as follows :
1) Item-Total correlation analysis eliminated 8 statements that lacked a significant correlation. Also, factor analysis of 42 statements excluding the previous eight eliminated 3 statements with a factor loading of 0.4 or less. Then, using principal component analysis and reliability analysis, the HSO orientation construct in CSFCs was identified in these 39 statements in the five dimensions.
2) When the T-scores computed for all five dimensions were compared for differences (low versus high) in organizational performance using t-test, T-scores differed significantly for flat hierarchy, innovativeness, and organizational learning. That is to say, a high performance organization’s T-scores were higher than those of a low performance organization for these three components.
In conclusion, the present findings suggest that the above five dimensions can be a valid viewpoint of organization design for creating the HSO in CSFCs.
