Club athletes' innovative work tendencies and levels of organisational blindness: Athletes' perspective

The aim of the study is to examine the tendencies of sports clubs towards innovation and organisational blindness levels from the perspective of athletes. In the study, 'Innovation in Sport Scale' developed by Kanario (2017) and adapted into Turkish by Demir, Sertbaş and Sivrikaya (2020) and 'Organisational Blindness Scale' developed by Aytemiz Seymen et al. (2016) were applied to the participants. The study was conducted with the participation of football, handball, volleyball and folk dances athletes in Gümüşhane province. The survey method, which is one of the quantitative research methods, was used as a data collection tool in the study. IBM SPSS 2021.0 programme was used for data analysis. As a result of the research, frequency and percentage were used for the findings related to the demographic characteristics of the athletes; the conformity of continuous variables to normal distribution was determined by Shapiro-Wilks test, and Kruskal Wallis non-parametric variance analysis was used in more than two categorical variables. Bonferroni correction was made for pairwise comparisons. Mann-Whitney U test was used in two-group variables. Spearman non parametric correlation coefficient was used in the correlation analysis between the scale scores. According to the results of the study, a high level, inverse relationship was found between the score of sports innovation in clubs and the total score of the organisational blindness scale (r=-0.610; p<0.001). As innovation in sport increases in clubs, the level of organisational blindness decreases (r=-0,621; p<0,001). In general, the results of the research are evaluated.