Highlights
- In sport, culture can determine a team’s focus and how members communicate and deal with conflict. Culture also establishes norms of acceptable behaviour and directly influences functioning and performance.
- Own the Podium, alongside partners the Canadian Paralympic Committee and Canadian Olympic Committee, identified sport culture as an important performance factor for Canadian athletes to achieve podium success.
- The culture of excellence model outlines strategies for sport organizations to improve their sport’s culture with the goal of achieving enhanced performance outcomes.
- Mental and physical health and well-being, physical safety, psychological safety and self-determination are key person-related factors that contribute to high-performing sport cultures.
An organization’s culture involves the values, attitudes and goals that are shared by a group of people. These values, attitudes and goals influence how the group interacts and operates as its members work toward a common goal.
Within and beyond sport, culture helps to determine a team’s focus, establishes norms of acceptable behaviour and directly influences a team’s functioning and performance. A team’s culture can dictate to team members how to behave, communicate, cooperate and deal with conflict. When clear norms are set, everyone on a team is more likely to follow them.
Own the Podium, Canada’s technical leader in high performance sport, alongside partners the Canadian Paralympic Committee and Canadian Olympic Committee, identified sport culture as an important performance factor for Canadian athletes to achieve podium success. In this article, we define sport culture and describe a “culture of excellence” in high performance sport. We also provide best practices for sport organizations to foster a culture of excellence that enhances the self-determination, safety, health and well-being of their athletes.
Defining sport culture
Research in the fields of organizational and social psychology has played a key role in understanding the relationship between organizational culture and sport culture (Cannon et al., 2006). In the workplace, an organization’s culture can have a significant influence on employee performance, morale, engagement and loyalty, as well as efforts to attract and retain talented employees (Warrick, 2017).
In sport, organizational culture has been identified as having a significant influence on an athlete’s ability to prepare for and perform at major international games (Fletcher & Hanton, 2003; Fletcher & Wagstaff, 2009). Elements of organizational stress, such as personal, team or leadership issues, are a source of strain for athletes that can ultimately affect talent development and how the organization functions as whole (Arnold et al., 2016; Fletcher & Wagstaff, 2009; Henriksen, 2015).
While it’s largely accepted that developing culture is important, until recently, there had been limited work done to define culture in the context of high performance sport in Canada. Furthermore, sport organizations in Canada have identified culture as an area of improvement.
High-performing cultures in Canadian sport
“Good culture is not about a mysterious chemistry; it’s about clarity.” – Daniel Coyle
Recognizing a need to operationally define sport culture, and more specifically, a culture of excellence, Own the Podium is driving a series of research initiatives. Own the Podium collaborated with the Canadian Paralympic Committee to identify several components that contribute to high-performing cultures in Canadian sport:
- Clarity of purpose: Excellence is the guiding principle of all team and organization members.
- Growth mindset: Team and organization members have a willingness to engage in challenging conversations and value the process of self-reflection in the desire to be a curious, lifelong learner.
- Leadership-led: Sport leaders must drive their own culture and engage in self-determined initiatives and strategies that support their drive for excellence.
- Coach-driven: The technical leaders (that is, coach or high performance director) are responsible for driving initiatives and supporting athletes and support staff so that those individuals will share and believe in the assumptions regarding excellence.
- Accountability: Team members are empowered to take ownership and initiative when there’s accountability in their organization’s culture.
- Subculture alignment: Team members within an organization have different roles and responsibilities. Additionally, each team member has sets of different cultural expectations that require alignment and agreement around a shared goal.
Research shows that high-performing cultures are achieved when the beliefs and actions of team members do 3 things (Cruickshank & Collins, 2012):
- Support sustained optimal performance
- Persist across time in the face of variable results, such as wins, losses and ties
- Lead to consistent high performance
When these ideal conditions are met, sport organizations can foster a culture of excellence that supports sustained high performance and personal thriving among its members.