Ted Hayduk and Matthew Walker

Scholarship has established that characteristics of a firm’s upper echelon affect firm-level outcomes in a range of industries. In professional sport, firms depend on live game attendance and, increasingly, the consumption of online content to generate local revenue. The ability to drive these two revenue streams depends on a franchise’s competencies in marketing, relationship management, and brand building. In this research, we speculate those competencies start at the top, i.e., with ownership. Using upper echelons theory (UET), we hypothesize that franchises with owners who have...Read more