ABSTRACT

All organizations including sport firms depend on human resources to run their businesses and achieve their organizational goals. For example, the state-of-the-art Yankee Stadium in New York will not be profitable to the Yankee Club if the majority of the 52,000 seats are not filled up by baseball fans every time there is a tournament being held there. The attendance of fans depends so much on the work contributed by the Yankee staff, which includes not only the Yankee baseball players, but other employees such as the stadium manager, marketers, public relation officers, promoters and so forth. Even the staff who sell tickets at the ticket counter, janitors who clean the premises, security guards who look after the safety of the crowd and stadium are also responsible for the spectators’ turning out as their work performance will influence the intention of these clients to repeat their visits to the stadium as well as spread good word of mouth to other potential spectators. In short, an organization may have very sophisticated and high-technology facilities. However, these resources will not be able to generate any income for the organization should there be no human resources with the right knowledge, skills and attitudes to make use of them for the organization’s advantage. This has been clearly summarized by Chelladurai (1999: 1) in the following statement.

While sufficient importance needs to be placed on the material resources, it is equally, if not more, important that the organization gives attention to the human resources because the human resources put the material resources into use and convert them into wealth.

Apart from being able to transform inanimate resources from being useless into something worthwhile and valuable to the organization, human resources are the only asset that cannot be copied by competitors. Barney (1991: 110) posits that “physical technology, whether it takes the form of machine tools or robotics in factories or complex information management systems, is by itself typically imitable.” Hence, should these imitable resources be the reason for the firms’ successes, it will not be too long before other competing firms outsmart them with the same and even better duplicates. Human resources, on the other hand, are unique creatures. Because of issues related to scarcity, specialization, and tacit knowledge, the work 146qualities of human beings are impossible to be cloned (Lippman and Rumelt, 1982; Teece, 1982). Coff (1997: 374) has simply concluded that human resources are “difficult to understand and observe.”