Exercise at work: Managing promising visions in a troublesome reality: an example of distributed leadership

Aim: This study explores sport, exercise and physical activities introduced in a workplace setting. While this perspective is relatively new to the society of sport management and therefore represents an extension of sport management practices (Kim et al. 2024), the phenomenon has been studied for decades in such diverse fields like occupational and preventive medicine and critical management studies. Whereas occupational medicine has emphasized the measurable potentials for employees´ health and well-being, critical management scholars have focused on the risk of blurring the line between work and leisure and using physical exercise to control employees. Less emphasis has been placed on investigating how promising visions of exercising employees can be enacted in a troublesome reality where time is a scarce resource, workplace hierarchy rules, and work tasks have precedence. One way to implement physical activities beyond a short, standardized, and researcher-assisted intervention is to appoint employees to take care of the task of introducing and facilitating exercise and serving as role models who can pursue colleagues to engage in new and healthy activities (Edmunds and Clow, 2016; Overbye and Wagner, 2023). Yet, empirically, our knowledge is still limited. Therefore, using workplace exercise as our topic the purpose of this study is to investigate the managerial efforts when promising visions are facing an often troublesome reality. We do so by qualitatively exploring the perceptions and experiences of managers and appointed employees acting as facilitators of exercise at work.

Theoretical background and literature review: The introduction of exercise and physical activity adds additional complexity to workplaces. We adopt an institutional logics perspective (Lounsbury et al. 2021) arguing that exercise practices draw on a logic embedded in community that guides and frames exercise and sport-like activities. Transferred to work-settings exercise and physical activities are confronted with logics of profession and corporate bureaucracy. While the institutional logics perspective serves as our meta-theoretical framework (Pache and Thornton, 2021), we engage with the idea of distributed leadership (Bolden, 2011) to illustrate how strategic tasks are carried out by sub-ordinate employees without formal managerial responsibilities. Merging these two perspectives enable us to contextualize the efforts of distributing leadership activities (Sewerin & Holmberg, 2017). Hence, inspired by the conceptualizations of Besharov and Smith (2014) we elucidate how variation in logics´ constellations may result in different outcomes with regard to implementation of exercise at work.

Research design: This qualitative study follows six Danish workplaces which introduce exercise during work hours facilitated by employees acting as exercise `captains’. From each of these workplaces appointed employees participated a short training program provided by the Danish Confederation for Company Sports. The idea is that these so-called captains after ending their short training program will encourage peer colleagues to participate in exercise activities introduced during working hours. Because previous research has pointed to the relation between employees and the direct manager as crucial for success for exercise at work programmes (Bond et al. 2023), managers (n=6) and employees acting as captains (n=12) are interviewed in the initial phase of the project (December ´23 – April ´24, just after employees ending the training program). Online and face-to-face interview lasting approximately between 43 and 53 minutes are carried out at the worksites. A thematic analysis is conducted (Braun and Clarke, 2006). A second round of interviews will be carried out with the same persons a year later. The purpose of applying this long-term design is to follow the efforts and challenges appearing after the (potential) early enthusiasm.

Findings: Preliminary results indicate an immediate enthusiasm among captains just after finishing the training program. It also reveals ambiguous perceptions of the role of captains: On the one hand captains experience that they have a closer relation to their colleagues compared to managers and that this proximity to a community put them in a good position to convince them to join exercise activities. On the other hand, only few captains experience that they carry out managerial tasks normally characterizing a corporate logic because exercise activities are voluntary and there is a limited scope of power or sanctions towards colleagues deciding not to participate in movement and exercise activities. Simultaneously, there is an anticipation that if managers themselves join the activities this will support and legitimize the captains´ efforts. This illustrates the oscillation between distributing informal leadership tasks to employees who nonetheless remain dependent of management´s active commitment.

Conclusion and implications: A model where employees are acting as captains has been suggested as a way to implement exercise during work hours. However, findings illustrate that implementing exercise is not a matter of harmonious blending of logics but shall rather be seen as a balancing act where introducing community elements like physical activities are simultaneously dependent on corporate support from top- and middle management. Hence, this study points to the tensions and organizational complexity of implementing exercise during work.

References
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