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Leader succession and effectiveness in team

sport. A critical review

Paper submitted to

12th annual EURAM Conference in Rotterdam (6th -8th June 2012)

TRACK 67:

Sport as a Business: Internationalisation, Professionalisation, Commercialisation General Track

Work in progress!

Please do not quote!

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When sport clubs fail a frequent measure is to change leadership. This is particularly the case for

managers of professional sport teams. 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, and there are indications that the frequency by which managers are sacked increases. In

English soccer, for instance, the average tenure for managers 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), and in the Spanish premier soccer league which contains 20 teams the

frequency was even higher, at least in the two seasons of 2002-3 and 2003-4 when 20 involuntary

and 2 voluntary changes were reported (Tena & Forrest, 2007). The high turnover rate in

professional soccer is corroborated in a fresh UEFA benchmarking report which revealed that 53

percent of the head coaches in the European top leagues had held their position for less than a

year at the time the clubs were licensed (UEFA, 2012).

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 organisation culture (see Kihl, Lebermann &

Schull, 2010 for a recent overview). One strand of leadership research in sport organisations that

in part seems to be overlooked by sport management researchers is the academic 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

which assumes that studying leader succession is very close to studying leadership (Giambatista,

Rowe & Riaz, 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 a lot of 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 noteworthy that in stark contrast to the hopes of club managers in

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professional team sports, decades of research into the performance effects of leader succession in

sport overwhelmingly returns the answer that change of manager or coach is not of much help

(Giambatista, Rowe & Riaz, 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 research in the sport field and this is

exactly the intention set out in this paper.

The remaining part of the paper proceeds through basically two sections: In the next section we

review the body of coach succession literature from its inception and until today. Following this

review we 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.

The legacy of the forefathers: Coach succession as common sense, vicious circle, or

scapegoating

Although the sociologist Oscar Grusky did not pretend that he was the first to study the

performance effects of shifts in management he is often credited for initiating the research

tradition within the field of leadership which assumes that leadership as a generic practice can be

profitably investigated when managers are substituted. Grusky was concerned with change in

organisations and argued that an important impetus for organizational change is change in key

management positions (1960). He pointed out that all organisations must cope with

administrative succession but he also assumed that succession is disruptive to organisations

because it disturbs traditional norms, conditions the development of new policies, and change

formal and informal relationships in the organisation. Grusky was aware that succession could

have functional consequences by bringing new ideas into the organisation and vitalize it, but he

was more concerned that it could promote conflict and lower employee morale, states that in the

end 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 a negative relationship between rates of administrative succession

and organizational effectiveness, ending up with a vicious circle argument: high rates of

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succession produce lower effectiveness which promotes more succession and even more dismal

performance.

In his article Administrative Succession in Formal Organizations (1960) Grusky realized that

studying the effects of changes in leadership was not straightforward. When changes occur very

different organisations may experience very different situations. Grusky suggested that

succession studies should investigate elements such as the relationship between the new manager

and the rest of the managers in the team, the position and role of the new manager, the types of

organizational members’ relationship, the effectiveness of the organisation, and its degree of

bureaucratization. However, when Grusky took up empirical studies in the field he simply did a

statistical correlation of the rate of changes in field management (i.e. average length of coaches’

tenure) and team standing at the end of the seasons he investigated (1963). To obtain a sample of

formal organisations that met his criteria of being identical in official goals, size, and authority

structure he set out to test his hypotheses in baseball organisations 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” (p.71). Real improvement in performance follows long-range

organisational decisions, argue Gamson and Scotch, and field-managers are subjected to these

decisions. Why should they make much difference when most of them are re-recruited out of a

pool of former managers who were fired in their previous job?

Gamson and Scotch tested their argument on 22 mid-season coach dismissals in baseball teams in

the 1954-61 period. They suggested that mid-season changes were more disruptive than between-

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season succession and therefore provided a fairer test of Grusky’s theory on organisational

instability. 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 managers would have to work with

the same team as their predecessors, hence the impact of the new manager can be more 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 took place in

periods of 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 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 field managers from

inside the team (previous assistant coaches or players) whereas most of those teams that saw

deterioration in performance had recruited new coaches 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 managers are replaced by external recruits.

In the almost five decades that has passed since the debate between Grusky and Gamson and

Scotch the sport team 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, White & Persad, 2005; Hughes, Hughes, Mellahi & Guermat, 2009), but there is also

substantial empirical support for Grusky’s vicious circle theory (Brown, 1982; Audas, Dobson &

Goddard, 1997; 2002; Bruinshoofd & ter Weel, 2003; Koning, 2003; Audas, Goddard & Rowe,

2006, Arnulf, Mathisen & Hærem, 2011, Soebbing & Washington, 2011 ). The last category of

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studies often arrive at their conclusions after having compared teams that do and teams that do

not change management in a bad situation. So even if teams recover after having fired their

manager, teams in similar situations that do not change leadership improve even more.

Studies that support the common sense hypothesis, that change in management increases

organizational performance, are far between and conditioned. Allen, Panian and Lotz (1979) are

one of very few exceptions but their findings of positive returns from coach changes in baseball

teams were valid only for between-season succession. Tena and Forrest (2007) also found

support for improved performance among Spanish top teams, but the improvement was only

valid on home ground and their sample comprised only two seasons. Rather than to discard the

common sense hypothesis, however, the discrepancy between the findings of succession research

and the common sense expectation of the effects of management replacement and has led

leadership researchers to ask if the positive impact of succession can be seen in the longer term.

Hence, the assumption that underpinned the research field for long time – that leadership

expresses itself as short-term performance change – was being questioned.

Looking to the longer term

Ironically, despite the overwhelming empirical support for the scapegoat and vicious circle

hypotheses, and 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 were encouraged to develop more

variegated theories and models, and to search for more long-termed influences. If new managers

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

managers’ tenures (1991) has been drawn upon in studies by Giambatista (2004) and Hughes et

al. (2010). 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

proposed an inverted U-shaped relationship between management tenure and organizational

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effectiveness comprising the five seasons of mandate response, experimentation, enduring theme

selection, convergence, and finally dysfunction. They posit that coaches 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 organisation against paradigm change.

Giambatista (2004) investigated 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. This means that he expected coach changes

to impact more rapidly on the teams’ performance than changes in team ownership. For the same

reason he expected field managers 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 coach’s tenure with performance decline setting in in the fifth

season. Controlling for the coaches’ previous experience and success Giambatista found general

support for his model although the immediate effect of succession was performance losses, in

general explained by disruption caused by in-season succession. In the longer run, however,

coaches saw increasing winning percentages, with experienced 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. (2010) investigated the succession of managers in English Premier League soccer

between 1992 and 2004, finding a positive correlation between longer tenures and sporting

success. However, manager change was not negatively related to short-term performance (10

games), nor positively related to long-term effectiveness (30 games), as was expected on the

basis of life-cycle theory and Grusky’s organizational instability argument. The authors found

that clubs that change managers 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

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in strategic problems and exacerbated by the experimentation of the new manager. 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 long-term improved team

performance in American college football. These authors studied succession and performance

from the 1950-1951 to the 2008-2009 seasons in NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision, a sport

where they proclaim no general manager or owner can influence the coach's decisions as in

professional sports. In the study one-year as well as four-year team performance was recorded. In

the one-year term performance diminishes and the authors report support for the vicious circle

hypothesis. However, in the four-year range they see performance improvement and claim

support for the common sense argument.

In stepping outside the strict confines of leader succession research a few studies can be

identified that have investigated the relationship between team members’ tacit knowledge or

stability and team performance (Berman, Down and Hill, 2002: Montanari, Silvestri and Gallo,

2008). In these studies managers are treated as part of teams and team continuity is seen as

predictor of effectiveness in sport. TO BE DEVELOPED ….

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

now supported empirically. The vicious circle and scapegoat theories 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 means after a season or so. Boards, accordingly,

should be more patient and courageous and not expect their coaches to improve the team’s

performance until into the second season. Or is it that simple?

A critique of leader succession research in sport

Can sport management research learn from leader succession research about leadership in sport?

This is an intriguing question given that so many of the studies within this research tradition have

been sport related (Giambatista et al. 2005). It should be noted, however, that these studies were

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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 organisations and cultures.

Accordingly, the sport related studies referred so far are published in journals that examine

leadership, management, decision making, or social science more broadly (Andersen, 2011, and

Soebbing and Washington, 2011, being the only exceptions).1 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 (about varying

performance scores and field-management replacements) and because structural variables across

teams were seen as constant.

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 management research, we might as well add

a question mark to the validity of the assumptions and concepts underlying their sport related

research. In fact, the issue of using sport coaches in studying the influence of top management

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), in their review

of the leader succession literature, 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 literature has

produced about the impact of coaches on performance (see above) 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 organisations. 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” (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

1 This could be attributed to the fact that many sport management journals originated late compared to journals in

more generic disciplines, but even after 1987 when the Journal of Sport Management commenced (Shilbury, 2011)

most studies on team sport performance and management succession have continued to be published outside

academic sport journals.

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measures of performance, reasonable measures of leader succession, and the ability to control for

many alternative explanations of performance variation” (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 just another business, 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

reference to recent developments European top 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” (Maier,

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 professional sports clubs have to incorporate,

rendering them pluralistic organisations 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 our

purpose it is noteworthy not only that (sport) management researchers identify substantial

differences between sport and business, but also that so many changes are seen to have taken

place over the last decades. If this observation is correct we must ask what bearing these changes

have on the validity of the leader succession studies with their footing on long time-series of

sport leagues. Has leadership also been changing?

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If sport is substantially distinct from other industries, at the least at some important dimensions,

Day and Lord’s (1988) objection to using middle-level managers to measure leadership is

relevant also to sport management. As these authors indicated the issue extends beyond the

matter of hierarchical influence as sport managers perhaps employ different measure of

organizational effectiveness than do CEOs. This is a point that is frequently brought up by

students of the sport business: sport organisations are of course dependent on proper funding, but

these resources are as a general rule deployed towards competitive success and not to shareholder

dividends (Smith and Stewart, 2010). As Chadwick (2009) 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” (p. 193). 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 is 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 given the assumption that leadership can be studied more accurately in sport

organisations than elsewhere, an assumption that has survived in the absence of qualitative

studies in which it could be challenged. To illustrate, recently Kelly and Harris (2010) have

shown that the relationship between the managers of football clubs and their directors are

frequently marked by distrust and enmity. Based on qualitative interviews with 25 professional

players and 20 managers from England and Ireland they point out how managers commonly see

the directors as unknowledgeable about the game yet frequently interfering in issues falling

within the managers’ domain, such as being questioned on issues surrounding the playing side of

things or eliciting information from players behind the backs of the managers. Whilst the

manager's knowledge of the game often emanates solely from their previous playing career,

directors and owners frequently have very different backgrounds (Kelly, 2008). Managers 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).

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Besides basing their management on previous playing careers Kelly’s (2008) football managers

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” (p. 402). This means that

the football managers have remained remarkably resistant to processes of professionalization and

bureaucratization 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 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

leadership in sport to other industries, it is certainly an issue if sport management research

acknowledges the assumptions about leadership that prevail in the leader succession literature.

Contrary to what has been presupposed in this strand of leadership research, Gammelsæter (2010)

has maintained that far from being simple organisations that easily lend themselves to succession-

performance measures, the commersialised sport club, at least in Europe, 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” (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 which between 1985 and 1999

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,2 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

2 Cf. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitesse#Team_Achievements

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corporation Nuon transforms the small amateur club into what they envision to be an

entertainment company with its own modern arena, Gelredome, opened in 1998. 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. One wonders therefore what a

statistical correlation between coach succession and performance in Vitesse would produce.

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 game characteristics of sport. A maximum amount of points

are 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 such as the number of points or the 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 result is that average net effect of changes will regress towards

zero. If all clubs in a league replace their coach during the season the net performance effect

would be zero3 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 of the “objective” measures of sport performance comes at

a price. If it is true that managers in sport can pursue practices that would put the CEOs of

business enterprises in jail it is also true that managers in sport are more constrained than

managers in other industries in terms of translating their leadership abilities into valid

performance measures. Executives in other industries can produce improved economic or market

3 Admittedly, in soccer this argument is thwarted when teams are awarded 3 points for a win, 1for a draw and 0 for a

lost game. This does not basically change the validity of the argument, however.

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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 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 coaches in particular, 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, which do not render the coaches the privilege to be

awarded for diverse capacities.

Concluding remarks

This far 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 we 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 field managers have on their teams. With the high turnover of management 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 not be addressed lightly. There

might be a rationale for studying management issues in sport (Wolfe et al. 2005), but in doing

this 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 field managers

work. 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 this

important issue. What are the conditions, for example, under which managers do have influence

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in sport teams, and is it personal or contextual qualities that sometimes undermine their impact on

the performance of the team?

Upon rounding up 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. We think this review shows the

opposite. Yes, sport is common and sport metaphors and anecdotes are frequently drawn upon to

highlight insights in other sectors of social life, but we suggest this popular use of sport is often

superficial and does not always 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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