Going abroad to play: Motivations, challenges, and support of sports expatriates

Abstract

Professional athletes moving abroad for their career is a novel phenomenon in international human resource management (IHRM). This exploratory article charts the motivations of sports expatriates to move abroad to play, as well as adjustment challenges and sources of support. A survey was conducted with 77 professional athletes in 10 different sports. The main motivations to move abroad were interest to experience life abroad, followed by the search for new challenges. In terms of challenges, different coaching style and communication issues were most often mentioned. Support was mainly informal, through team mates rather than professional providers. Our article contributes to the literature because it is one of the first studies focusing on sports expatriates from an international HR perspective. Our study provides information on a vulnerable group of expatriates; they are young in age and under extreme performance pressure. Sports expatriates need all the support they can get, and yet, little professional support is offered. K E Y W O R D Schallenges, international human resource management (IHRM), self-initiated expatriates (SIEs), sports expatriates, support

Dumbo: a trajetória de um atleta como síntese da conexão Brasil-Angola

“…Diversos autores se debruçam sobre a questão das relações entre migração e esporte. Dentre os quais podemos destacar (MAGUIRE, 2007;HOULIHAN, 2010;RYBA;STAMBULOVA;RONKAINEN, 2016;JANSEN;OONK;ENGBERSEN, 2018;VAN BAKEL;SALZBRENNER, 2019;. O que eles têm em comum refere-se à compreensão de que as migrações não ocorrem de maneira uniforme e que são resultado de causas e consequências distintas.…”

Performance effects of interaction between multicultural managers and multicultural team members: Evidence from elite football competitions

“…Krause and Szymanski (2019) argued that soccer resembles global manufacturing industry as: (a) it is a truly global activity; (b) the service is standardized and, thus, internationally comparable; (c) performance is accurately measured and the data is, again, comparable; (d) the industry is highly competitive, hence even subtle differences may play an important role; and, finally, (e) “the global nature of soccer facilitates the transfer of (knowledge,) technology, and skills (Krause & Szymanski, 2019:2981). The football context has been recently applied to study international business questions such as manager migration (Peeters et al, 2019), expatriate management (van Bakel & Salzbrenner, 2019), the effects of managers' background on team performance (Szymanski et al, 2019), and individual bicultural background liability (Szymanski & Ipek, 2020).…”

Sport and International Management: Exploring research synergy

“…Sport, thus, can provide a novel lens for IB researchers to examine a range of topics related to the global mobility of human resources. These include expatriation and repatriation (Bolino, 2007), use of personal employees networks (Andersson & Sundermeier, 2019), global talent management (Abeuova & Muratbekova‐Touron, 2019; Allen, Lee, & Reiche, 2015), global careers (van Bakel & Salzbrenner, 2019), bicultural individuals and acculturation (Szymanski et al, 2019), and the role of language in IB (Harzing & Pudelko, 2013).…”

“…International HRM research offers important insights. Van Bakel and Salzbrenner studied athletes' motivation and major challenges for sport expatriates and provided “information on a vulnerable group of expatriates [who] are young in age and under extreme performance pressure” (van Bakel & Salzbrenner, 2019, p. 505). Likewise, as organizations such as the NFL, NBA, and EPL move beyond their domestic base and expand their geographic reach, sport marketers and promoters will be tasked to develop new strategies for reaching wider and more diverse audiences, and competing with global and local rivals.…”

“…Our analysis of manuscripts published 2000–2019 in IB and management journals1 reveals that the IB scholarly community has not paid much attention to sport. The only three studies we identified were published recently in Global Strategy Journal (Peeters, Mills, Pennings, & Sung, 2019), International Business Review (Szymanski, Fitzsimmons, & Danis, 2019), and Thunderbird International Business Review (van Bakel & Salzbrenner, 2019). In contrast, sport has been used as a research context in publications such as Strategic Management Journal (e.g., Holcomb et al, 2009; Aime et al, 2010), Academy of Management Journal (e.g., Berman, Down, & Hill, 2002; Cotton, Shen, & Livne‐Tarandach, 2011; Grohsjean, Kober, & Zucchini, 2016), Administrative Science Quarterly (e.g., Staw & Hoang, 1995), Organization Science (e.g., Wolfe & Putler, 2002), and the Journal of Management Inquiry (e.g., Wolfe et al, 2005).…”