Matching and Winning? The Impact of Upper and Middle Managers on Team Performance in Major League Baseball

Thomas Peeters, Steven Salaga and Matthew Juravich
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Steven Salaga: Texas A&M University, United States
Matthew Juravich: University of Akron, United States
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Michael McAleer

No 15-115/VII, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: We investigate the joint impact of managers at different hierarchical levels on firm performance in Major League Baseball. We separately quantify the contribution of upper and middle managers and the impact of their match quality—the degree to which managers cooperate effectively across layers to impact firm success. We establish that match quality is a statistically significant and economically meaningful driver of firm performance. Higher-quality managers tend to be matched together across levels and achieve higher match quality during their joint employment. Match quality does not improve over the length of a joint employment spell, but lower match quality is found in pairs with more divergent educational attainment and prior strategic approaches. Hence, match quality is partly innate, and manager pairings may have difficulty improving their cooperation through learning. When we control for match quality, we find significantly lower estimates of heterogeneity in manager ability compared with commonly used estimators of managerial impact. Still, both middle and upper managers retain a meaningful impact on firm performance.

Keywords: match quality; management; team performance; Major League Baseball (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L83 M12 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-10-13, Revised 2020-03-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tin:wpaper:20150115

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