Positively Prosocial: Conceptualizing Prosocial Behaviors as Institutional Work within Sport Organizations

Institutional work, defined as the actions aimed at creating, disrupting, and maintaining institutions, has become an important framework within sport organization research. Despite important theoretical advances, scholars have called for more research to better develop theoretical understandings of how embedded actors influence institutions. The aim of this paper is to examine how individual actors may engage in relational institutional work within sport organizations through prosocial behaviors. In this paper, the authors outline how prosocial behaviors such as organizational citizenship behaviors, whistleblowing, voice behaviors, mentoring, knowledge-sharing, and brokering introductions may impact the creation, maintenance, and disruption of institutions. Thus, this paper extends the institutional work framework by explicating how daily interactions impact institutionalization within sport settings.