In our “winner-take-all” society, athletic directors often find themselves in a state of conflict as they attempt to produce championships, generate revenue, and provide satisfactory opportunities for athletic teams. Thus, insights into antecedents that influence an administrator’s decisions in managing membership claims and pursuing organizational goals is of relevance. To accomplish this, the theories of stakeholder management were utilized to determine whether athletic team salience could influence an athletic director’s decisions during one budget cycle. Furthermore, since NCAA Division I athletic programs operate in “like” environments, it is worthy to establish whether athletic department’s use similar strategies when distributing resources to their teams. To do so, the paradigms of population ecology, institutionalism, and strategic choice were drawn upon to determine whether organizational isomorphism exists within this population.
To establish the relationship between team salience and operating budgets, a web-based survey was developed to obtain the salience levels for each team of an athletic department. This served as the independent variable and was regressed against the team’s operating budget for the 2004-05 academic year. The study’s findings suggest that the association between variables demonstrates an exponential pattern. Piecewise regression established a significant break point (salience threshold) and indicated that 86.20 percent of variance in operating budgets could be explained by changes in variables. For team salience values below the threshold, predicted operating budgets demonstrated a horizontal pattern of distribution. For team salience values above the threshold, the relationship between variables was directly related.
To determine the degree of organizational isomorphism of NCAA Division I athletic departments, a cluster analysis was performed to determine if programs “reside” in analogous groups. Relative operating budgets served as clustering variate to create an allocation profile for each institution. The findings indicate that three unique groups can be identified. A multiple discriminant analysis was utilized to identify group characteristics. The descriptor variables included the athletic department’s classification level, the school’s funding source, the undergraduate enrollment, the athletic department’s efficiency coefficient, and the geographic location. Two discriminant functions were generated that significantly accounted for 97.33 and 2.34 percent of the relative between-group variability, respectively.