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Leader succession and effectiveness in team
sport.
A critical review of the coach succession literature
Hallgeir Gammelsæter
Faculty of Economics, Informatics and Social Sciences
Molde University College, Specialized University in Logistics
hallgeir.gammelsater@himolde.no
Author details:
Dr. Hallgeir Gammelsæter is Professor in Social Change, Organization and Management. He has
published research on organization change, management in professional organizations,
knowledge diffusion, and innovation in private and public institutions. He has co-authored
several books including one on the organization and governance of top football in Europe and has
published on the organization of football in Soccer and Society, European Sport Management
Quarterly, and most recently in the Handbook of Research on Sport and Business (Söderman and
Dolles, 2013).
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Abstract
Purpose – This article critically reviews the part of the leader succession literature which is
based on coach turnover in sport teams. The aim of this is to assess the state of the art and the
relevance of this literature for sport management and further research.
Design/methodology/approach – A comprehensive reading of the extant scientific literature and
a critical assessment of its conceptual and methodological foundations
Findings – The assumptions guiding the coach succession are not based on insights about the
idiosyncrasies of team sport and its management. These flaws render the research findings of the
research dubious and leave us with little reliable information of what influence coaches have on
their teams and what the impact is of the high turnover of head coaches in professional team sport
Research implications – Leader succession research in sport is heavily flawed because it has not
been informed by qualitative studies exploring the contextual conditions under which the coaches
work. It follows that qualitative studies of the impact of coaches is highly wanted. Furthermore,
the generalization from findings in sport across other spheres of social life should be addressed
with caution because sport is much more idiosyncratic than has been assumed in the coach
succession literature.
Originality/value – This is the first review of the leader succession literature from a sport
management perspective. It provides a profound critique of the research on coach succession in
team sport
Keywords leadership, management, succession, effectiveness,
Paper type Critical literature review
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1. Introduction
When sport clubs fail a frequent measure is to change head coach (in this text I will use the terms
head coach or coach to denote the equivalent of trainer or (field) manager as it is used for
instance in British football/soccer). This is particularly the case in professional team sport. When
teams perform below expectations the fate of the head coach is very often put on the agenda, by
the media, fans, and eventually the board of directors. There is indication that the frequency by
which coaches are sacked have increased. In English soccer, for instance, the average tenure for
coaches in the FA Premier League is reported to have decreased from about 3 years in 1992-3 to
less than 1½ year in 2007-8 (Bridgewater, 2010). The high turnover rate in professional soccer is
corroborated in the latest UEFA benchmarking report which reveals that the average length of
service of club head coaches in the European top leagues is 18 months, as measured in September
2012 (UEFA, 2013).
Because in competition sport the aim is winning, the topic of the effects of leadership is essential
to sport management. Over the last two decades research associated with leadership in sport
management has been examining issues such as the impacts of leader characteristics, self-
perception or leadership styles on organizational effectiveness, employees’ job satisfaction, or
occupational stress as well as the characteristics of transformational and transactional leadership
behavior and its influences on effectiveness and organization culture (see Kihl et al. (2010) for a
recent overview). One strand of leadership research in sport organizations that in part seems to be
overlooked by sport management researchers is the literature on leader succession and
performance. This research tradition was initially based on studies of sport coaches (cf. Grusky,
1963, Gamson & Scotch, 1964), and the number of coach succession studies has proliferated to
the extent that it now makes up one of the main bodies of a research tradition that assumes that
studying leader succession is very close to studying leadership (Giambatista et al., 2005).
The fact that this research has developed outside the community of sport researchers, with the
bulk of its studies being published outside sport journals perhaps explains why it is not always
regarded as sport management research. However, succession research addresses a sport
management issue which affects stakeholders in sport and also attracts great publicity, and for
this reason its relevance for sport management research should be critically evaluated. It is also
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noteworthy that in stark contrast to the hopes of club managers in professional team sports,
decades of research into the performance effects of leader succession in sport overwhelmingly
returns the answer that change of head coach is not of much help (Giambatista et al. 2005,
Andersen, 2011). Sport management research should be intrigued by this contradiction between
theory and the practice in the field. A first step in this direction should be to critically assess the
leader succession literature in the sport field and this is exactly the intention set out in this paper.
The remaining part of the paper proceeds through basically three sections: In the next two
sections I review the body of coach succession literature from its inception and until today.
Following this review I set forth to formulate a critique of sport related leader succession research
which has consequences for the understanding of leadership in sport management. The paper is
rounded up by drawing together the threads to conclude on further challenges for sport
management research.
2. The legacy of the forefathers: Coach succession as common sense, vicious circle, or
scapegoating?
Sociologist Oscar Grusky is often credited for initiating a research tradition within the field of
leadership which assumes that leadership as a generic practice can be profitably investigated
when head coaches are substituted. Grusky was concerned with change in organizations and
argued that an important impetus for organizational change is change in key management
positions (1960). He pointed out that all organizations must cope with administrative succession
but he also assumed that succession is disruptive to organizations because it disturbs traditional
norms, conditions the development of new policies, and change formal and informal relationships
in the organization. Grusky was aware that succession could have functional consequences by
bringing new ideas into the organization and vitalize it, but he was more concerned that it could
promote conflict and lower employee morale, which might impact negatively on organizational
cohesiveness and performance. Indeed, when Grusky went about to study the effects of
succession his hypotheses were rather negatively framed (1963). He proposed that high rates of
succession produce lower effectiveness which promotes more succession and even more dismal
performance.
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Grusky (1960) realized that studying the effects of changes in leadership was not straightforward.
When changes occur very different organizations may experience very different situations.
Grusky suggested that succession studies should investigate elements such as the relationship
between the new coach and the rest of the coaches in the team, the position and role of the new
coach, the types of organizational members’ relationship, the effectiveness of the organization,
and its degree of bureaucratization. However, when he took up empirical studies he simply did a
statistical correlation of the average length of head coaches’ tenure and team standing at the end
of the seasons he investigated (1963). To obtain a sample of formal organizations that met his
criteria of being identical in official goals, size, and authority structure he set out to test his
vicious circle hypotheses in baseball organizations, which provided what he judged to be valid
measures of leader succession and effectiveness scores.
Grusky argued that his test on baseball teams in two time periods (1921-41 and 1951-58) proved
wrong the common sense belief that managerial succession could rectify bad performance. On the
contrary, his data supported the vicious circle hypothesis, i.e. that higher rates of managerial
succession deteriorate organizational effectiveness. Gamson and Scotch (1964), however,
disapproved Grusky’s conclusions and advocated scapegoating as an alternative understanding of
high succession rates in sport teams. Their assertion was that coaches do not make much
difference at all, and when they are fired because of bad results it is nothing more than ritual
scapegoating; “a convenient anxiety-reducing act which the participants regard as a way of
improving performance” (ibid, p.71). Real improvement in performance follows long-range
organisational decisions, contended Gamson and Scotch (ibid), and head coaches are subjected to
these decisions. Why should they make much difference when most of them are re-recruited out
of a pool of former coaches who were fired in their previous job?
Gamson and Scotch tested their argument on 22 mid-season head-coach dismissals in baseball
teams in the 1954-61 period. They suggested that mid-season changes were more disruptive than
between-season succession and therefore provided a fairer test of Grusky’s organisational
instability hypothesis. They also pointed out that in mid-season there were less opportunities for
other changes such as signing or retirement of players and that new coaches would have to work
with the same team as their predecessors, hence the impact of the new head coach can be more
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precisely measured. They reasoned that if the common sense hypothesis was right mid-season
dismissals should lead to increased team effectiveness. If Grusky was right, decreasing
performance should be observed after succession. And if the test yielded no change at all in
performance, the scapegoat theory would be supported.
18 of the 22 mid-season successions Gamson and Scotch (1964) investigated resulted from
declining performance, as was expected. Half of the teams increased their won-lost record on a
longer basis (as of the end of the season compared to two weeks before coach dismissal) whilst
the other half experienced decreasing performance. Gamson and Scotch waived to draw a firm
conclusion from the modest data, but argued that head-coach impact on team performance still
had to be established. Grusky (1964), on the other hand, responded to Gamson and Scotch by
replicating their study and pointing out that most of the baseball teams that improved their won-
lost record on a longer basis had recruited their new coaches from inside the team (previous
assistant coaches or players) whereas most of those teams that saw deterioration in performance
had recruited from outside the organisation. Grusky saw this as sustaining the argument that
succession easily leads to disruption of relationships and that this is more likely when coaches are
replaced by external recruits.
In the almost five decades that has passed since the debate between Grusky and Gamson and
Scotch the sport branch of the leader succession research tradition has produced a lot of statistical
studies. Many of them seem to end up supporting the scapegoat theory, thus rejecting that
replacements have much influence on organisational performance (e.g. Eitzen & Yetman, 1972;
McPherson, 1976; Brown, 1982; Pfeffer & Davies-Blake, 1986; Canella & Rowe, 1995; McTeer
et al., 2005; Hughes et al., 2009). However, there is also substantial empirical support for
Grusky’s vicious circle theory (e.g. Brown, 1982; Audas et al., 1997; 2002; Bruinshoofd &
Weel, 2003; Koning, 2003; Audas et al., 2006, Arnulf et al., 2011, Soebbing & Washington,
2011). The last category of studies often arrive at their conclusions after having compared teams
that do and teams that do not change leadership in bad situations. They find that teams recover
after having fired their coach, but teams in similar situations that do not change leadership
improve even more.
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Studies in sport that support the common sense hypothesis, that change in team leadership
increases organizational performance are far between and conditioned. Allen et al. (1979) found
positive returns from head-coach changes in baseball teams, but this was valid only for between-
season succession. Tena and Forrest (2007) found support for improved performance among
Spanish soccer teams, but the improvement was only valid for home matches and their sample
comprised only two seasons. Despite these disappointing results, the failure to support the
common sense hypothesis has not led leadership researchers to discard the hypothesis altogether
but rather to ask if positive impact of succession can be seen in the longer term. Hence, the
assumption that underpinned the research field for a long time – that leadership expresses itself as
short-term performance change – was questioned.
3. Looking to the longer term
Ironically, despite the disapproval of the common sense argument it is exactly the assumption
that leadership makes a difference and therefore must prove itself through leader succession that
keeps up the research tradition and a steady production of studies in the field (Rowe et al., 2005).
In face of the deceptive empirical support researchers are encouraged to develop more elaborate
theories and models, and to search for more long-termed influences. If new coaches do not have
positive short term effects it must perhaps be possible to detect positive impacts in the longer run
(Day and Lord, 1988)?
To test long-term effects life cycle theory such as Hambrick and Fukutomi’s model of seasons in
coaches’ tenures (1991) has been drawn upon in studies by Giambatista (2004) and Hughes et al.
(2009). Inspired by Eitzen and Yetman’s (1972) disregarded research finding that there was a
relationship between college basketball coach tenure and team success, Hambrick and Fukutomi
(1991) proposed an inverted U-shaped relationship between management tenure and
organizational effectiveness comprising the five seasons of mandate response, experimentation,
enduring theme selection, convergence, and finally dysfunction. They posit that managers
experience performance gains during the first 6-11 years in office, before improvement gives way
to a dysfunction phase in which the now powerful manager increasingly disengage
psychologically by losing task interest and protecting the organization against paradigm change.
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Giambatista (2004) investigated head-coach and team owner tenures in American basketball in
the years 1946-2002, positing shorter life cycles for coaches than for team owners because the
former operate much closer to the core activities of the sport, i.e. that they have more rapid
impact on the teams’ performance than have owners. For the same reason he expected coaches to
reach the peak of the inverted U-shaped cycle earlier than owners. Based on Katz (1982) who
found performance decline in R&D teams after about four years he proposed that the basketball
team would reach its highest team winning percentage in the third or fourth season of the head-
coach’s tenure with performance decline setting in in the fifth season. Controlling for head-
coaches’ previous experience and success Giambatista found general support for his model
although the immediate effect of succession was performance losses. In the longer run, however,
head coaches saw increasing winning percentages, with the experienced head-coaches improving
their teams most rapidly, and with a first peak in the third season of their tenure. Performance
decline set in during the seventh season which was two years later than proposed. As expected,
team owner succession had less immediate influence on performance and owner tenures also
peaked later than coach tenures.
Hughes et al. (2009) investigated the succession of coaches in English Premier League soccer
between 1992 and 2004 and found that clubs that change coaches may experience a short-term
reprieve, but their performance did not improve in the longer run (during the season). They
suggest that the short-term recovery masks the real problems of the club and temporarily suspend
performance declines that are rooted in strategic problems and exacerbated by the
experimentation of the new head-coach. They further argue that these disruptive dynamics are not
captured by Hambrick and Fukutomi’s (1991) tenure model and that permanent improvement
requires longer tenures than 30 games.
Recently Soebbing and Washington (2011) reported findings of succession and long-term
improved team performance in American college football in the seasons 1950-1951 to 2008-
2009. One-year and four-year term performances were recorded. In the one-year term
performance diminishes and the authors report support for the vicious circle hypothesis. In the
four-year range they see performance improvement and claim support for the common sense
argument.
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In stepping outside the confines of leader succession research Berman et al. (2002) and
Montanari et al. (2008) have investigated the relationship between team members’ tacit
knowledge or stability and team performance. In these studies the head coach is treated as part of
the team and team continuity is seen as predictor of effectiveness in sport. The studies report
strong support for the predicted positive relationship between shared team experience and team
performance in basketball (Berman et al., 2002) and soccer (Montanari et al, 2008), but their
findings diverge when it comes to coach effects. The latter study reports no autonomous coach
turnover effect on team performance, whereas Berman et al. (2002) find that the positive
performance effect of coaching experience with the same team will decline as shared experience
grows.
Taking the results of the succession research in sport at face value it seems fair to conclude that
all the three hypotheses that developed in the debate between Grusky and Gamson and Scotch are
supported empirically. The vicious circle and scapegoat hypotheses match the findings of short-
term effects whereas the common sense hypothesis holds only for long-term effects, which
according to most findings reported above, translates into a season or so. Boards, accordingly,
should be more patient and courageous and not expect their coach to improve the team’s
performance until into the next season. Or is it this simple?
4. A critique of leader succession research in sport
Can sport management learn from the leadership succession literature? This is an intriguing
question given that so many of the studies within this research tradition are sport related
(Giambatista et al., 2005). It should be noted, however, that these studies were undertaken not to
explore sport issues per se but to investigate the general notion of leadership, assuming that
leadership expresses itself in similar ways across organizations and cultures. When Grusky
(1963) decided to use baseball teams as the units in which to study leadership, baseball was not
chosen because it was sport but because it was seen to provide easy access to adequate data and
because structural variables across teams were seen as constant. Accordingly, the coach
succession studies are published in journals that examine leadership, management, decision
making, or social science more broadly. This could be attributed to the fact that many sport
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management journals originated late compared to journals in more generic disciplines, but even
after 1987 when the Journal of Sport Management commenced (Shilbury, 2011) studies on team
sport performance and coach succession have continued to be published outside academic sport
journals. Andersen (2011) and Soebbing and Washington (2011) are very recent exceptions.
While we might infer from this that sport teams have been used as a 'laboratory' for leadership
researchers that are not particularly seasoned in sport as a research field, we might as well add a
question mark to the validity of the assumptions and concepts underlying their research. In fact,
the issue of using sport coaches to measure the influence of top leadership was raised from within
the community when Day and Lord (1988) argued that sport coaches are analogous to middle-
level managers in businesses who are conditioned in their leadership by long-term strategies
decided by upper-level executives. Giambatista et al. (2004) refute this criticism by arguing that
even if the coaches are middle-level managers they have disproportionate organizational impact
and often substantial influence on the general manager's decision. Given the dubious findings this
stream of literature has produced about the impact of coaches on performance this defense is
peculiar. The same can be said about the defense put forth by Rowe et al. (2005) for generalizing
from sport to large corporations and industrial organizations. One of their arguments is that
'results of other sports-related studies have been used to inform research that studies the impact of
leader succession on performance in large corporations' (ibid., p. 216). It is a slender argument
that non-sport management researchers accept the assumption that the difference between the
situation of sport coaches and top-level corporate executives is insignificant, even though the
authors further argue that the strength of studying leadership in sport organisations is that they
provide 'objective measures of performance, reasonable measures of leader succession, and the
ability to control for many alternative explanations of performance variation' (ibid., p.216). The
gist of this argument is that leadership can be studied more accurately in sport organisations than
in other organisations. But is this really the case? Is sport void of any idiosyncrasy that impacts
on its leadership and on how its effects can be measured?
What is leadership in sport?
Recently Chadwick has argued that the knowledge base, skill set, and practice of sport
management is distinct from managing in other sectors (2009, p. 192). Meier (2008), with
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reference to recent developments in European football, sees the instable governance of the sport
as the result of tensions between politically supported amateur logics and commercial logics.
Professional sport in Europe, rather than being conceived as a commercial industry in its own
right 'is only regarded as an apex of a much larger and deeper grassroots movement' (Meier,
2008, p.105). Gammelsæter (2010) takes a step further and argues that the commercial mindset is
only one of a multitude that present-day European commercialized sports clubs have to
incorporate, rendering them pluralistic organizations that must play diverse 'rules of the game'.
Furthermore, Smith and Stewart (2010), based on a revisit to their own previous list of sport
management idiosyncrasies (Stewart and Smith, 1999), have concluded that there are now four
features that clearly distinguish sport from business (as opposed to the ten that they initially
marked out). Among these is the fundamental instability of sport performance, resulting in a
constant need of hands-on management in order to engineer a level playing field and a minimum
level of quality. They also conclude that sport employs a number of anti-competitive practices
'that would normally put the CEOs of business enterprises in jail' (Smith and Stewart, 2010,
p.11). The reduction of sport specificities from ten to four is attributed to significant structural
and operational change that professional sport has undergone over the last decade, but the
remaining idiosyncratic features is still seen as justifying a customized set of management
practices. For the purpose of this paper it is noteworthy that sport management researchers
identify substantial differences between sport and business, and also that changes related to
professionalism, commercialism, mediation, globalization etc. have taken place over the last
decades. If this observation is correct we must ask what bearing it has on the validity of the leader
succession studies with their footing on long time-series of sport leagues. Has sport leadership
also been changing?
If sport is substantially distinct from other industries, at the least on some important dimensions,
Day and Lord’s (1988) objection to using middle-level managers (coaches) to measure top
leadership is relevant also to sport management. As these authors indicated the issue extends
beyond the matter of hierarchical influence as sport coaches perhaps employ different measure of
organizational effectiveness than do CEOs. This is a point that is frequently brought up by
students of sport management: sport organizations are of course dependent on proper funding, but
these resources are as a general rule deployed towards competitive success and not to shareholder
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dividends (Smith and Stewart, 2010). As Chadwick (2009, p. 193) points out, sport has
traditionally been product led: 'it has been what happens on the field of play, the athletes involved
in this and the management of them, that have largely dictated the product offering'. This means
that return on investment is not measured in monetary dividends but in trophies, and in
professional sport these diverse measures are frequently not converging. This explains why the
tension between product and marked leadership has intensified with increased commercialization
and commodification.
About this defining issue of sport management the leader succession studies are silent. This is no
surprise. In the absence of qualitative studies that could challenge it, the assumption that
leadership can be studied more accurately in sport than elsewhere has persisted. To illustrate,
recently Kelly and Harris (2010) have shown that the relationship between the head coaches of
football clubs and their directors are frequently marked by distrust and enmity. Based on
qualitative interviews with professional players and coaches in England and Ireland they point
out how coaches commonly see the directors as unknowledgeable about the game yet frequently
interfering in issues falling within the coach's domain, such as being questioned on issues
surrounding the playing side of things or eliciting information from players behind the backs of
the coaches. Whilst the coach's knowledge of the game often emanates solely from their previous
playing career, directors and owners frequently have very different backgrounds (Kelly, 2008).
Coaches try to defend their territory by requiring total control over team affairs and some are
keen to have this stated in their contracts (Kelly and Harris, 2010).
Besides basing their management on previous playing careers, Kelly’s (2008, p. 402) coaches are
seen to rely solely on traditional forms of authoritarianism, i.e. respect for the sanctity of age-old
rules and customs, which involves loyalty to a personal master. This means that the football
coaches have remained remarkably resistant to processes which increasingly have subjected the
clubs to rational modes of co-ordination and control. If Kelly (2008) and Kelly and Harris (2010)
are right this further means that assumptions about leadership in professional sport clubs must
capture that strategic decision processes are impacted by separate 'communities of knowing'
which apply very different logics (e.g. Jönsson, 1989). While the main concern in this paper is
not how this impacts on the generalisation of sport leadership to other industries, it is certainly an
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issue whether sport management research acknowledges the assumptions about leadership that
prevail in the leader succession literature. Contrary to what has been presupposed in this
literature, Gammelsæter (2010) has maintained that far from being simple organisations that
easily lend themselves to succession-performance measures, the commercialized sport club is a
highly complex pluralist organisation. This entails that its management is exposed to many
constituents carrying diverse institutional logics that are ´horizontally pluralist, vertically
extended, interdependent, contradictory, reciprocally entangled, and brought together through a
meta-identity arrived at through different institutional constructions´ (ibid., p. 586). Such a
depiction of sport leadership is a far cry from the assumptions in leader succession research of an
easily observable relationship between objective measures of performance and reasonable
measures of leader replacements (e.g. Rowe et al., 2005).
Another study which illustrates shortcomings in leader succession research is Uden (2004). Uden
investigated the transformation of the Dutch soccer club Vitesse. Between 1985 and 1999 Vitesse
increased its season ticket sale from 200 to 23.000, its number of sponsors from 10 to 400, its
number of “non-players” employees from 0 to 75, its budget from € 360.000 to € 27 million and
establishes itself as a powerful premier league (Eredivisie) club after having been hopping
between Eredevisie and the second level for many years. Concurrently there were 13 coach
successions in the club,
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but this information is not even mentioned in Uden’s study which rather
revolves around how the local businessman Karel Aalbers with the help of the ambitious energy
corporation Nuon transformed the small amateur club into what they envision to be an
entertainment company with its own modern arena, Gelredome. According to Uden’s critical
investigation, leadership, conceived of as influence, primarily takes place in the relations between
Aalbers and sponsors and entrepreneurs engaging in the vision of creating something more than a
football club. His findings contrasts sharply with the findings of leader succession research and
so does his methodological approach. What would a statistical correlation between coach
succession and performance produce in Vitesse?
The zero-sum dynamics of team sport
Another feature which is particularly pronounced in team sport but largely ignored in leader
succession research is the zero sum characteristic of sport. A maximum amount of points are
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allocated among the teams every season irrespective of the quality of the play or the leadership
abilities of management. Therefore, if all or some coaches improve their leadership and the
quality of the play is improved the number of points awarded to the teams is still the same. When
field results (i.e. number of points or win lose ratio) is used as the measure of improvement,
which is the case in leader succession research, it means that the gains of some clubs are the
losses of others. The average net effect of changes will regress towards zero (in soccer this
argument is in part thwarted when teams are awarded 3 points for a win, 1for a draw and 0 for a
lost game, but this does not basically change the validity of the argument). If all clubs in a league
replace their coach during the season the net performance effect would be zero and accordingly,
there would be no overall leadership effect. Furthermore, if changing the coach improves
performance other teams may follow suit and replace their coaches and the net effect would
regress towards zero. The dynamics of the game structure prevent that improved or diminished
quality of the game can be measured accurately.
The point here is that the points system in sport does not reveal improvement or deterioration in
leadership. This means that the appeal that the 'objective' measures of sport performance has had
on succession researchers comes at a price. If it is true that sport clubs can pursue practices that
would put the CEOs of business enterprises in jail it is also true that leaders in sport are more
constrained than in other industries in terms of translating their leadership abilities into valid
performance measures. Executives in other industries can produce improved economic or market
shares, sometimes without losers because of improvement in economic cycles, or because they
innovate or redefine the borders of the industry, or diversify into other markets. Because of the
specific nature of sport, sport managers, to a large extent, are deprived of instruments that CEOs
in other industries use to enhance performance, such as rationalising the industry through cross-
ownership, acquisitions, alliances, and mergers. And furthermore, crises are frequently met with
spending (such as coach replacement) rather than cost-cutting to improve the performance of a
team that is otherwise expected to fail. Sport managers, and head coaches, are stuck with
measures which do not necessarily award them righteously for their effort. The very 'objective'
measures of sport are also very crude measures. These do not render the coaches the privilege to
be awarded for diverse capacities which in most cases are more likely to be directed towards on-
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the-field product management in contrast to corporate general managers which are expected to
employ broader orientations.
5. Concluding remarks
Leader succession research has been underpinned by assumptions that leadership is generalizable
across industries, that it is basically unitary, and that team sport in particular lend itself to
measuring succession effects on performance because in sport there are objective measures of
performance and reasonable measures of leader succession. In this paper I have argued that none
of these assumptions stand towards profound scrutiny based on insights about the idiosyncrasies
of team sport and its management. These flaws render the research finding of succession research
in sport dubious and leave us with little reliable information of what influence coaches have on
their teams. With the high turnover of head coaches in professional team sport this is unfortunate.
What can be learned from this critique of leader succession research in sport? One conclusion is
that the issue of generalization across spheres of social life should be addressed with caution.
There might be a rationale for studying management issues in sport (e.g. Wolfe et al., 2005), but
in doing so the specificity of sport should not be overlooked. The assumptions on which the
research relies must be explored. Leader succession research in sport is heavily flawed because it
has not been informed by any qualitative studies exploring the conditions under which the
coaches work and the dynamics influencing their actions. Such an undertaking would have left
the research tradition with more realistic assumptions about leader influence and opened new
avenues to exploration and understanding of the issue. What are the conditions, for example,
under which coaches do have influence in sport teams? Is it personal or contextual qualities that
sometimes undermine their impact on the performance of the team? And how do the functions of
the coach relate to other management positions in the club?
One might speculate if the dismal quality of leader succession research in sport is related to an
understanding that cognizance of sport is so common that there is no need to explore what sport
is and what processes and dynamics it entails. I think this review shows the opposite. Sport is
common and sport metaphors and anecdotes are frequently drawn upon to highlight insights in
other sectors of social life, but this popular use of sport is often superficial and does not always
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stand to a more profound scrutiny. It follows that it is the task of social research to explore the
specificity of sport(s) and to better substantiate any generalizations from sport to other sectors of
society, be it leadership or any other social activity.
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Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitesse (retrieved June 15. 2013)
