The Amateur Sports Leadership Challenge: A Study of Who Leads Amateur Sports in America Today and How Well They Practice Exemplary Leadership

Business    Managers/Executives/Administrators

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TITLE: The Amateur Sports Leadership Challenge: A Study of Who Leads Amateur Sports in America Today and How Well They Practice Exemplary Leadership
 
RESEARCHER: Wanda L. Rutledge
School of Business and Technology
Capella University
Unpublished doctoral dissertation: March 2007

OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study was to derive a more comprehensive understanding of the CEOs for national amateur sports organizations and the level of self-reported transformational leadership they exhibit.

METHODOLOGY
Participants were 74 full-time chief executives in national U.S.-based single-sport or multi-sport organizations (74% response rate). Each completed the Leadership Practices Inventory and provided demographic information. The typical respondent was male (82%), Caucasian (93%), holding a college graduate (80%), between 55-59 years of age (28%), and in their position for less than 10 years (68%). Internal reliability of the LPI in this study was .90.

KEY FINDINGS
The overall LPI score of CEOs did not vary on the basis of the organization’s size (as identified based upon organizational budgets), gender, or tenure (length of service); this was also true for each of the five leadership practices. The author points out that these results “from an under-researched population of amateur sports executives” (p. 65) support Kouzes and Posner’s (2000) claim that the LPI is generally not related to various demographic characteristics.

In this study, amateur sports executives report somewhat higher scores on four of the five leadership practices compared with LPI normative data (the exception being Model the Way).