Career Anchors of Executives and Soccer Managers in Brazil

Abstract

The professionalization of football has led to the adoption of corporate and strategic management. In this sense, attention to the hiring of trained professionals is increasingly high, both in terms of experience, training, skills and their motivations. In addition to skills, it is also considered their Career Anchors, which are a combination of motivations, preferences, interests, aspirations and values that represent the essence of the worker. This study aimed to analyze the Career Anchors of soccer executives and managers. As specific objectives, the ordering and classification of Career Anchors in the sample, verifying similarities between the results obtained with the skills defined for professional practice. This quantitative, cross-sectional and descriptive research sampled 26 soccer executives or managers who worked in clubs of the 2019 Brazilian Soccer Championship, from a population of 70 professionals affiliated with the Brazilian Association of Soccer Executives. The instrument used for data collection was the Career Anchors inventory elaborated by Schein and Maanen (1993), extracted from the book Carrer Anchors by Dutra and Albuquerque (2008), which classify them into eight different categories: Technical Competence, Management Competence General, Independence, Security, Entrepreneurship, Dedication to a Cause, Pure Challenge and Lifestyle. Descriptive analyzes were performed, considering the mean and standard deviation to describe the variables and, to test the significant difference between the means of the anchors, a one-way ANOVA and multiple comparisons with Bonferroni post-hoc adjustment were used. The results found indicate that the anchor that obtained the highest value was Pure Challenge, with an average value of 5.1, followed by the Technical Competence anchor, with 4.8, and Dedication to a cause, with 4.6. It is possible to see that Entrepreneurship had the lowest average and had little variability: 2.7 with a standard deviation of 1.0. The Pure Challenge and Dedication to a cause anchor predominate, both with 30.8% of the total, followed by Technical/Functional Competence with 23.1%. Entrepreneurship was the only anchor that was not the greatest in any case. These findings may contribute to the understanding of the motivations and preferences of football executives and managers in clubs, in addition to subsidizing the analysis of adherence of profiles to positions and functions assumed for professional management.