Date of Award

8-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)

Degree Discipline

Business Administration

Abstract

This research aimed to isolate and emphasize the role of coaching in a sports team’s success within the National Football League (NFL) context, bridging the gap between academic research and practical applications in sports leadership. For this purpose, data from the 2014-2023 NFL seasons and Pro Football Reference were analyzed to evaluate the impact of coaches’ leadership styles on NFL teams’ performance. Extant literature focused on the characteristics of individual players, teams, and coaches, not necessarily related to leadership style, that can lead to team success. Thus, emphasizing the direct impact of leadership style represents a potentially significant contribution to this literature. The study employed textual analysis for classification using interviews with NFL coaches and similar sources to address the challenges of categorizing NFL coaching behaviors into distinct styles. It then used multivariate regression analysis to test several hypotheses linking leadership styles, specifically transformational and autocratic, to team outcomes. Factors such as coach experience and tenure were considered as controls to ensure the validity of the findings. The results showed that although the NFL is dominated by autocratic coaches, transformational leadership significantly improves a

team’s chance of success, that is, making it to the playoffs. Ultimately, the findings inform decision-making processes for NFL team owners, managers, and coaches when selecting coaching staff members and developing strategic plans for their teams. Additionally, the insights generated from this research could have broader applications beyond the NFL and inform coaching practices in other sports leagues or non-sports contexts in which leadership and team performance are critical.

Keywords: NFL, sports coaching, leadership style, transformational leadership, autocratic leadership, sports team performance

Committee Chair/Advisor

Hesam Shahriari

Committee Member

Thiagarajan Ramakrishnan

Committee Member

Yi Zhang

Publisher

Prairie View A&M University

Rights

© 2021 Prairie View A & M University

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Date of Digitization

9/13/2024

Contributing Institution

John B Coleman Library

City of Publication

Prairie View

MIME Type

Application/PDF

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