抄録
In professional sport clubs, where uncertainty is high, ability to perform flexible operations is an
important issue. However, in research on the management of professional sport, the question of how professional sport clubs demonstrate flexibility has not been fully considered. In the field of service research, “operational flexibility” refers to the capability of an organization to effectively respond to uncertainty in business operations. In this context, empirical verification of operational flexibility that takes into account the nature of the service business, while integrating the results of previous research, is an important research issue. Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop a concept for capturing operational flexibility in professional sport clubs using the Gioia methodology, a systematic and inductive qualitative research method.
The survey was conducted through semi-structured interviews with a total of six people, including
executive, administrative staff, and employees, of Fagiano Okayama Sports Club (a J-League club). The collected interview data were analyzed using the three-step coding process of the Gioia methodology.
The analysis revealed that operational flexibility of a professional sport club is related to its organizational capability to respond to uncertainty that occurs in the “provider sphere”, “joint sphere”, and “customer sphere” of the service value-creating process. The club’s operational flexibility is composed of the aggregate dimensions of “organizational flexibility”, “interaction flexibility”, and “flexibility in use”. The results of this analysis were derived with respect to the marketing theory of “service logic” of the Nordic school of service marketing. Organizational flexibility included the second order themes of “input flexibility”, “procedural flexibility”, “front office staff flexibility”, and “facility flexibility”. Interaction flexibility included the second order themes of “competition management flexibility”, “service space flexibility”, and “customer relationship flexibility”. Flexibility in use included the second order theme of “flexible information provision”. In addition, this study confirmed that flexibility is demonstrated when uncertainty moves among the three spheres of the service value-creating process. Future research topics include theoretical and empirical investigations of the issue of power in interaction flexibility.
