Inter-organizational routine replication: Evidence from major football championships

Abstract

We study the replication of organizational routines through key employee mobility in the context of major football championships. While discussed in the literature of evolutionary economics and in some management studies, this kind of routine replication lacks systematic empirical evidence. The empirical analysis exploits two related samples assembled from several web sources. Employing a combination of descriptive and econometric approaches we show that: 1) when a coach moves from one team to another, there is no significant difference between the routines he/she employs in the latter compared to the routines he/she employed in the former, and 2) when one team changes its coach, there is a significant change in the team routines.