The contribution of leadership and human resources to organizational success: An empirical assessment of performance in major league baseball

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to an underdeveloped area within the resource‐based view (RBV) of strategic management. Relatively little work has been carried out concerning the concurrent contribution of leadership and human resources to a given organization's success. We investigated the relative contribution of these two resources to competitive advantage within the context of professional baseball. We found that player resources (defense/pitching and offence/batting) explained 67% of the variance in winning percentage, while leadership explained very little (slightly more than 1%) of the variance. We relate our results to seminal RBV arguments and find these supportive of our findings. We also explore the minimal contribution of leadership in our results. We suggest a number of ways that future research could investigate this further. While we limited the leadership construct to the “field manager,” future studies could expand the construct to include the “management team” (i.e., include coaches) and/or corporate leadership.