The Structures of Co-Hosted Sports Event Organizing Committees ​ And ​Organizational Learning Outcomes

In the last two decades, we have seen an increasing number of co-hosting alliances organizing major sports events (Byun et al., 2019). As relationships between multiple host organizing committees become more complex, the use of Interorganizational Relationships (IORs) is relevant in studying such relationships (Babiak et al., 2018). When allocating hosting rights, event owners design different organizational structures to manage their events (Parent, 2017) which then forms an IOR between the co-hosts. The current research demonstrates the importance of the structure of the IORs on their further management and outcomes (Gerke et al., 2021; Hoff et al., 2020). Walzel (2018) also found that there is a social legacy potential in co-hosted events with inclusive management approaches. Therefore, this study builds upon this research to see how organization structures, in particular, affect the co-host collaboration and therefore the outcomes of it. In the light of the need to study organizational structures of organizing committees of the major events beyond the Olympic context (Parent, 2017), this study will therefore fill in this research gap. Thus, the concepts of organizational structure (complexity, formalization, and centralization), organization control, and risk management (Byers et al., 2012; Geeraert, 2017 and Jennings, 2017) will help us to understand the organizational structure design of co-hosted event IORs. The following research questions were formulated: 1) What are the organizational structures of organizing committees at various co-hosted sports events? 2) What are the collaboration outcomes under each organizational design? The multiple case-study design is applied to gain a panoramic view of organizational structures (Yin, 2009). We focus on single sport one-off major and medium-sized co-hosted events by two or more nations that happened in the last 10 years. Eight co-hosted event editions were identified for this study: UEFA Euro, IHF World Championship, EHF Euro, CEV Eurovolley, FIBA World Cup, FIBA Eurobasket, IIHF World Championship, and ICC World Cup. The data is collected through semi-structured interviews with event owners and event organizers of the 8 events as well as through document analysis of all related governance documents of these events. The interviews and documents are analyzed both deductively (for pre-determined codes on organizational structure and the event governance) and inductively via NVivio v.10 software. As the study is currently at the data analysis stage, the results will be presented at the conference. The organizational structures of each event and the cross-comparison between the events will be demonstrated. This will advance our understanding on how co-hosts collaboration is affected under such structures, and more particularly, how organizational structures may facilitate or hinder their collaboration. Therefore, event owners can use the study results to adapt their event governance tools to foster collaboration, which can be conducive to further legacy benefits of the event organizers. The theoretical contribution of this research is that it is one of the first studies that looks at organizational structures with regards to co-hosted event IORs and that involves empirically such a diverse range of the latest co-hosted events across different sports.