Contributions in Merlin

The new UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations have encountered stiff criticism. The concerns are that the new regulations may harm football in three different ways: By forgoing the potential benefits from substantial injections of external money into payrolls, by restricting competition in the player market without at the same time achieving benefits from more balanced competition, and by creating some sort of barrier to entry which could freeze the current hierarchy of clubs. It is the purpose of this paper to take these concerns as a starting point for discussing the likely effects of the new regulations. As a by-product it will become obvious why and in which points the concerns are unfounded.

Despite the fact that childbearing is time-consuming (i.e. associated with a negative resource effect), we descriptively find female researchers with children in business and economics to be more productive than female researchers without children. Hence, female researchers with children either manage to overcompensate the negative resource effect associated with childbearing by working harder (positive incentive effect), or only the most productive female researchers decide to go for a career in academia and have children at the same time (positive self-selection effect). Our first descriptive evidence on the timing of parenthood among more than 400 researchers in business and economics from Austria, Germany and the German-speaking part of Switzerland hints at the latter being the case: only the most productive female researchers with children dare to self-select (or are selected) into an academic career. Our results have important policy implications when it comes to reducing the “leaky pipeline” in academia.

We investigate the workforce heterogeneity of startups with respect to education, age and wages. Our explorative study uses data on the population of 1,614 Danish firms founded in 1998. We track these firms until 2001 which enables us to analyze changes in workforce composition over time. Such a dynamic analysis constitutes a hitherto neglected area of entrepreneurship research. To assess relative workforce heterogeneity, we construct a simulated benchmark to which we compare observed workforce heterogeneity. We find that the initial workforce is relatively homogeneous compared to our benchmark. Our result holds both for non-knowledge-based and, to a lesser extent, knowledge-based startups. This seems surprising since a vast management literature advocates heterogeneous teams. The difficulties associated with workforce heterogeneity (like affective confl ict or coordination cost) as well as "homophily" (peoples inclination to bound with others with similar characteristics) hence appear to generally overweigh the benefits of heterogeneity (like greater variety in perspectives or more creativity). We also document that workforces become more heterogeneous over time - startups add workers with skills different from the workforce at startup. The initial supposedly "poor" mix of workforce characteristics is hence adjusted as the startup matures. This increase in workforce heterogeneity is, however, smaller compared to our benchmark but substantially larger than is team additions had the same characteristics as the initial team members.

This paper develops a framework for illustrating why sponsored sports entities, the "sponsees", often struggle to achieve their sponsorship-related goals to maximise sponsorship income, to satisfy their sponsors, and to create positive image or brand effects through the sponsorship. Based on a review of existing literature and a series of interviews with experts from sponsors, sponsees, and sports agencies, we identify six sources of inefficiencies at the sponsee side that can impede the achievement of the sponsorship-related goals. We further disentangle the underlying drivers for the identified sources of inefficiencies, mainly resource constraints, capabilities and know-how issues, communication issues, and the management's "degree of professionalism". While previous research in sports sponsorship has concentrated mainly on the sponsor perspective and marginalised the sponsee perspective, we put the sponsee at the centre of our study.

In this paper we compare the emerging field of open strategy to the established field of open innovation in order to facilitate their cross-fertilisation both in research and practice. Taking a communication-centred perspective, we argue that in both fields ‘openness’ concerns opening-up the communication process towards previously excluded individuals. On the basis of our review of the literature, we introduce a general framework that distinguishes between two dimensions of openness in terms of the direction that communication takes: sharing communication content with external participants and audiences and receiving communication content from external participants and audiences. Using the two dimensions of sharing and receiving, we map documented cases of empirical research in both fields and identify different forms of openness in processes of open innovation and open strategy. As we will show, in the material that we examined, in most of the cases of open strategy sharing and receiving are combined, while in many cases of open innovation we identified only one dimension. We suggest that this difference arises because, unlike innovation, open strategy typically involves joint sensemaking and thus a bidirectional communication process. Drawing on our findings, we put forward three propositions to provide a foundation for future empirical research on phenomena of open innovation and open strategy.

UEFA has revised its Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations in June 2015 (new FFP). Based on a conceptual analysis of the main components of new FFP – the Break-Even Requirement (BER), the Fair Market Value Principle (FVP) and the concept of Voluntary Agreements (VA) – this comment arrives to the following main conclusions: New FFP follows old FFP in creating hard budget constraints for football managers and in discriminating against “payroll gifts” and therefore against benefactors that are willing to inject money in exchange for “pure” sporting success. But new FFP is now less vulnerable to the allegation that it discriminates against true entrepreneurs wishing to develop mismanaged football clubs into sustainable businesses. The new concept of Voluntary Agreements (VA)gives them more flexibility to invest, particularly in such environments where quality is only slowly remunerated by the football markets.

Although many studies examine if players in sports and especially in tennis bene t from a psychological or physiological boost (momentum) none examine whether the set score as a dependent variable or tournament rounds as independent variables are important determinants when assessing momentum. We empirically investigate whether professional female and male tennis players benefit from momentum. In contrast to previous work, we nd players we find players bene t from momentum as long as they control a match. Once players lose control over a match, they have a signi cantly lower chance to win the next set than their opponent. This loss of control results in what we call anti-momentum.

In this paper, we analyze whether structured PhD programs operate at optimal size and whether there are differences between different disciplinary fields. Theoretically, we postulate that the relation between the size of a PhD program and program performance is hump shaped. For our empirical analysis, we use hand-collected data on 86 Research Training Groups (RTGs) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). As performance indicators, we use (a) the number of completed PhDs and (b) the number of publications by RTG students (PhD students and postdoctoral researchers). Applying DEA with constant and variable returns to scale, we find that the optimal team size varies between 10 and 16 RTG students in the humanities and social sciences. In contrast, our empirical analysis does not uncover a systematic relation between size and performance for RTGs in the natural and life sciences.

The leadership literature shows consistent, sizeable, and persistent effects indicating that female leaders face significant biases in the workplace compared with male leaders. However, the social identity leadership literature suggests these biases might be overcome at the team level by adjusting the number of women in the team. Building on this work, we conducted 2 multiple source, multiple wave, multi-level randomized field experiments to test if the gender composition of teams helps to restore equity in leadership evaluations of men and women. Across two samples of university students engaged in a team-building exercise, we find that male leaders are rated as more prototypical leaders than female leaders despite no differences in leaders’ self-reported prototypicality; however, this male leadership advantage is eliminated in gender-balanced teams. In Study 2, we extend this finding by supporting a moderated mediation model showing that leader gender and the team’s gender composition interact to relate to perceived trust in the leader, through the mediating mechanism of leader prototypicality. Findings support the social identity model of organizational leadership and indicate a boundary condition of role congruity theory, bolstering our need for a more social relational, context-based approach to leadership.