The Role of Managers in Team Performance

David Berri, Michael Leeds, Eva Leeds and Michael Mondello ()
Additional contact information
Eva Leeds: Moravian College and Temple University of Japan
Michael Mondello: The Florida State University

International Journal of Sport Finance, 2009, vol. 4, issue 2, 75-93

Abstract: The role of the manager in promoting production is a little-understood phenomenon. In particular, it is difficult to separate managers’ contributions from the abilities of the workers they supervise. Firms may therefore mistakenly attribute the contributions of the workers to the managers who happen to oversee them. With its plethora of performance data, the National Basketball Association (NBA) provides a natural setting to measure the contribution of a head coach to the performance of his team. We find that some highly regarded coaches deserve their accolades, but several coaches owe their success to managing highly talented teams. Conversely, some coaches with mediocre records have made significant contributions to the performance of their players. Most coaches, however, do not have a statistically significant impact on their players or their teams, making them nothing more than the “principal clerks” that Adam Smith called managers over 200 years ago.

Keywords: coaching efficiency; National Basketball Association; productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.fitinfotech.com/IJSF/IJSFbackissueWVU.tpl (text/html)
Full-text download requires subscription from FIT.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jsf:intjsf:v:4:y:2009:i:2:p:75-93

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.fitinfote ... IJSFbackissueWVU.tpl

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Sport Finance is currently edited by Arne Feddersen, Babatunde Buraimo, Joachim Prinz and Jane Ruseski

More articles in International Journal of Sport Finance from Fitness Information Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Victor Matheson ().