Authority Acceptance and Team Performance: Insights from the English Premier League

Abstract

Classical management theory identifies authority acceptance as fundamental to organizational success. Based on this perspective, the higher the degree to which employees find managerial orders to be acceptable – the greater organizational adaptation capacity and consequently performance. Despite being central to classical theories of organization, authority acceptance has been understudied by current management perspectives. In this study, we examine conditions under which higher degrees of authority acceptance may improve organizational performance. Drawing on insights from authority acceptance theory and the information processing view, we posit that under high task and agent interdependence and high architectural knowledge, i.e. when success is a function of effectively coordinating coproduction - groups with higher authority acceptance will perform better due to their increased coordination capacity. We expect this relationship to be stronger under conditions in which groups are more likely to perceive authority as legitimate and to identify with the organization. We examine our hypotheses using data from the English Premier League – one of the world’s most popular, competitive, highest stakes and culturally diverse soccer competitions. Our empirical results are consistent with our theoretical expectations and indicate that higher levels of team authority acceptance are associated with better results controlling for manager and team characteristics. The robustness of our findings derives from the fixed effects specification in our models and is supported by several robustness checks including instrumental variable analyses.