March Madness in the Collegiate Sport Workplace: Cultural Implications for Sport Employees

Abstract

Drawing upon Schein and Schein's three-level conceptual framework of organizational culture, the purpose of this study was to examine how organizational culture and a sense of community manifest within intercollegiate athletics departments during March Madness. Considering the popularity of intercollegiate sport and March Madness, it is important for scholars to understand how organizational culture may influence the attitudes and behaviors of collegiate sport employees in the workplace. Thus, semi-structured interviews and observations were conducted to better understand how culture, community, and the phenomenon of March Madness traverse. Analysis of the data revealed a unique organizational culture within intercollegiate athletics departments, distinguishing them from other nonsport organizations. It was also discovered that socialization processes occur during March Madness, which can foster a sense of community. Implications for these findings are discussed and practical recommendations for collegiate athletics departments are provided.

Conceptualizing A-HERO for sport employees’ well-being

“…Harter, 2002) have paid attention to the concept of authenticity because they believe it can bring other desirable outcomes such as morality and peace. For sport employees, the ability to be authentic and by extension recognize their own drawbacks and control their emotions coincides with the unique challenges of working in the sport sector (see Oja et al , 2018; Todd and Andrew, 2008; Todd and Harris, 2009; Todd and Kent, 2009). More so, given the importance of ethical decision making in sport organizations, authenticity has been viewed a critical feature for sport employees (Hums et al , 1999; Pfleegor and Seifried, 2016).…”

“…As Kim et al (2019) noted, understanding the well-being of sport employees is an “essential requirement in strengthening current sport organizations” (p. 109). Moreover, the sport industry has experienced an infusion of labor supply as witnessed by the willingness of sport employees to accept lower wages and work longer hours (Hums et al , 1999; Newman, 2014; Oja et al , 2018). The resulting stress on sport employees necessitates the exploration of mechanisms to support employee well-being (Kim et al , 2019).…”

Advancing NCAA March Madness Forecasts Through Deep Learning and Combinatorial Fusion Analysis

“…March Madness, the annual collegiate basketball tournament, epitomizes the inherent unpredictability of sports that often exceeds conventional forecasting techniques reliant on basic statistics or sentiment. This realization underscores the need for sophisticated data-driven methodologies to predict tournament outcomes better [1,2]. The past decade has witnessed machine learning and data analytics being increasingly adopted across various sports [3].…”

“…This research develops an ensemble deep learning approach combined with Combinatorial Fusion Analysis (CFA) to predict March Madness tournament wins and losses. The study utilizes a comprehensive dataset from Kaggle encompassing historical NCAA Division games for men's basketball 1 . Rigorous data preprocessing, feature engineering, and transformation are first implemented to ready the data for team-based modeling.…”