Reimagining sport/leisure workplace design and management: conceptualizing sport/leisure employee growth

Rationale/purpose: The purpose of the study is to construct a model of sport/leisure employee growth within the framework of positive deviance. The model is meant to provide scholars and practitioners with innovative strategies to improve the performance and experiences of participants, consumers, and employees. Design/methodology/approach: The study is conceptual and relies on the tenets of positive organizational scholarship to frame the innerworkings of the model and their ramifications for sport/leisure organizations. Findings: The model's antecedents include job design, job crafting, and attitudes toward innovation and development from organizational leaders. The antecedents provide applications from different levels of sport/leisure organizations, and the spiral structure of the model consists of a renewable process that includes meaningful work, knowledge acquisition, and innovativeness. Outcomes of the spiral process are proposed for three different constituencies within sport/leisure organizations: employees (psychological well-being), consumers/participants (subjective well-being), and the overall organization (performance). Practical implications: The model provides an employee-based framework to enable improved experiences and functionality within sport/leisure organizations. Research contribution: A positive deviance perspective is applied to the managerial elements of sport and leisure. The model can be used to enable virtuousness among sport/leisure employees which is proposed to have a cascading effect throughout the organization.