Team Ownership and Philanthropy in Professional Sport: A Perspective on Organizational Generosity.

Corporate philanthropy (CP) is a vehicle for businesses to create a social impact in communities where their operations are located. An overlooked aspect of this phenomenon is the role and function played by CP influencers within firms-particularly organizational principals/owners. Using an upper echelons perspective, this study explores the relationship between team ownership and the level of CP in the professional sport context. To this end, longitudinal data of philanthropic giving of 94 U.S. professional sport teams in the NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL were collected. We also collected team owner characteristics such as individual/family ownership, age, tenure as team owner, other charitable work, educational background, and connection to community from a variety of publicly available sources. The findings revealed that team owner age, ownership tenure, and previous philanthropic involvement contributed to increased charitable giving in professional sport team corporate foundations. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in the paper.

Capacity building through cross-sector partnerships: a multiple case study of a sport program in disadvantaged communities in Belgium.

BACKGROUND: Recent research has illustrated the need for cross-sector partnerships to tackle multidimensional problems such as health inequalities and sport and physical activity promotion. Capacity building is based on partnerships and has demonstrated effectiveness in tackling these multidimensional problems. This study aims to explain how cross-sector partnerships build capacity at the practitioner, organisational and partnership levels. The subject of this study is a community sport program (CSP) that aims to increase sport participation rates and physical activity levels. METHODS: The study examined multiple cases in four disadvantaged communities in Antwerp, Belgium where the CSP was implemented. Forty-four face-to-face interviews were held with leaders from sport, social, health, culture and youth organisations that collaborated with the CSP. RESULTS: Thirteen elements of cross-sector partnerships were identified as critical to building capacity at each of the different levels. These include: process evaluation, trust, mutuality, policy support, partner complementarity and fit, diversity of activities and period of collaboration-time. Trust in turn was fostered by a longer period of collaboration-time, better personal contact, clearer coordination and an external focus. Policy support was developed by support of partners and establishing clear metrics of success. CONCLUSION: Insight into the key elements of cross-sector partnerships that build capacity is given and several practical recommendations are suggested for practitioners and policy makers.

Interrelation of Sport Participation, Physical Activity, Social Capital and Mental Health in Disadvantaged Communities: A SEM-Analysis.

BACKGROUND: The Health through Sport conceptual model links sport participation with physical, social and psychological outcomes and stresses the need for more understanding between these outcomes. The present study aims to uncover how sport participation, physical activity, social capital and mental health are interrelated by examining these outcomes in one model. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey was conducted in nine disadvantaged communities in Antwerp (Belgium). Two hundred adults (aged 18-56) per community were randomly selected and visited at home to fill out a questionnaire on socio-demographics, sport participation, physical activity, social capital and mental health. A sample of 414 adults participated in the study. RESULTS: Structural Equation Modeling analysis showed that sport participation (ß = .095) and not total physical activity (ß = .027) was associated with better mental health. No association was found between sport participation and community social capital (ß = .009) or individual social capital (ß = .045). Furthermore, only community social capital was linked with physical activity (ß = .114), individual social capital was not (ß = -.013). In contrast, only individual social capital was directly associated with mental health (ß = .152), community social capital was not (ß = .070). CONCLUSION: This study emphasizes the importance of sport participation and individual social capital to improve mental health in disadvantaged communities. It further gives a unique insight into the functionalities of how sport participation, physical activity, social capital and mental health are interrelated. Implications for policy are that cross-sector initiatives between the sport, social and health sector need to be supported as their outcomes are directly linked to one another.

Evaluation of a cross-sector community initiative partnership: delivering a local sport program.

Corporate community initiatives (CCI) are often established via cross-sector partnerships with nonprofit agencies to address critical social problems. While there is a growing body of literature exploring the effectiveness and social impact of these partnerships, there is a limited evaluative research on the implementation and execution processes of CCIs. In this paper, we examined the implementation and operational processes in the delivery of a professional sport organization's CCI initiative using program theory evaluation. The findings showed discrepancies between the associate organization and the implementers regarding understanding and fulfilling responsibilities with performing certain aspects (maintaining accurate records and program marketing) of the service delivery protocol. Despite program stakeholders being satisfied overall with the program delivery, contradictions between program stakeholders' satisfaction in the quality of program delivery was found in critical components (marketing and communications) of the service delivery. We conclude that ongoing evaluations are necessary to pinpoint the catalyst of the discrepancies along with all partners valuing process evaluation in addition to outcome evaluation.

Criteria of effectiveness in multiple cross-sectoral interorganizational relationships.

As the popularity of interorganizational relationships (IORs) grows, the challenge of evaluating the effectiveness of achieving desired outcomes has emerged as a concern for both practitioners and academics [Atkinson, M., & Maxwell, V. (2007). Driving performance in a multi-agency partnership using outcome measures: A case study. Measuring Business Excellence, 11(2), 12-22; Callahan, K., & Kloby, K. (2007). Collaboration meets the performance measurement challenge. The Public Manager, 36(2), 9-24; Coulson, A. (2005). A plague on all your partnerships: Theory and practice in regeneration. International Journal of Public Sector Management 18(2), 151-163.]. The purpose of this paper is to empirically compare the effectiveness criteria used by a nonprofit Canadian sport organization and its partners embedded in multiple cross-sectoral relationships. To that end, three levels of effectiveness criteria were investigated: the community, network, and organization levels. A qualitative case study was conducted on the nonprofit sport organization and its multiple cross-sectoral partners. The results suggest that some criteria for measuring IOR effectiveness among partners were highly interrelated, some reflected competing values, some were shared across all partners, and some were ambiguous in the measures of effectiveness of IOR outcomes. Implications for future research and for practice are discussed.