HARD JOB: DEFINING JOB DESCRIPTIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF BASKETBALL MANAGERS (A CASE STUDY OF TURKEY)

Sport clubs consist of simple or complex organizational structures that have typical properties of social organizations. For a sport club to continue its existence and to be managed effectively, the club needs specialised human resources and personnel with necessary training. Additionally, it can easily be stated that current sports do not allow an improvisational management style due to the complex structure of them and demands of professionals and that there are different duty and responsibility distribution within unique hierarchical structures of each sport club. It is possible express that general managers, working for basketball clubs or in basketball departments of sport clubs, have important roles at managerial level. However, there are no written scientific materials in Europe regarding job definition, scope of responsibility/authority, and competence of basketball managers.  Well-defined job description should meet the priorities and needs of an organisation. Therefore, in basketball clubs, it is important to develop job description for general managers. Within this scope, the purpose of this study was to determine occupational definitions, duty-responsibility fields, and competences of basketball general managers working in teams competing in Turkish Men’s Basketball Super League and Turkish Men’s Basketball League. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews were conducted with total of 10 general managers. Obtained data were coded compliant with content analysis methods and divided into themes.  In this context, total of 41 codes were created under 7 themes. Based on these codes and themes, it was found that general managers are individuals who have different roles to act as a bridge to provide happiness of team and organisation, who act in almost all stages of various management process within the club, who put efforts for all work and operation solutions, who have various personal competence in addition to certain level of sportive, education, management history, and who are generally responsible towards president and board of directors.