Doing Exercise Every Day at Work: Individual Goals through Collective Achievement

The primary question of the article is “What makes different people come to an unofficially organized group and do sports together on a daily basis?” Against the background of the societal norm to do sports in order to be healthy, each of the members of an informal sports group sets goals and objectives, ranging from keeping oneself fit, slim, or muscular; these objectives are juxtaposed with the specifics of their professional activity and intellectual work. Workouts within this group are an interesting example of the ambivalence of how people individually set own goals but need the group to achieve them. Furthermore, the goals are achieved through group-building by sharing common emotions such as suffering and empathy. This article is a part of ongoing research, which follows the grounded theory and analyses the group through observation of participants over first six months of the existence of the group. We conducted fifteen semi-structured interviews with the members of the group and performed qualitative analysis of documents.