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1. Introduction
When sport clubs fail a frequent measure is to change head coach (in this text I will use the terms head coach or coach to denote the equivalent of trainer or (field) manager as it is used for instance in British football/soccer). This is particularly the case in professional team sport. When teams perform below expectations the fate of the head coach is very often put on the agenda, by the media, fans, and eventually the board of directors. There is indication that the frequency by which coaches are sacked have increased. In English soccer, for instance, the average tenure for coaches in the FA Premier League is reported to have decreased from about three years in 1992-1993 to <1½ year in 2007-2008 (Bridgewater, 2010). The high turnover rate in professional soccer is corroborated in the latest UEFA benchmarking report which reveals that the average length of service of club head coaches in the European top leagues is 18 months, as measured in September 2012 (UEFA, 2013).
Because in competition sport the aim is winning, the topic of the effects of leadership is essential to sport management. Over the last two decades research associated with leadership in sport management has been examining issues such as the impacts of leader characteristics, self-perception, or leadership styles on organizational effectiveness, employees’ job satisfaction, or occupational stress as well as the characteristics of transformational and transactional leadership behavior and its influences on effectiveness and organization culture (see Kihl et al., 2010 for a recent overview). One strand of leadership research in sport organizations that in part seems to be overlooked by sport management researchers is the literature on leader succession and performance. This research tradition was initially based on studies of sport coaches (cf. Grusky, 1963; Gamson and Scotch, 1964), and the number of coach succession studies has proliferated to the extent that it now makes up one of the main bodies of a research tradition that assumes that studying leader succession is very close to studying leadership (Giambatista et al., 2005).
The fact that this research has developed outside the community of sport researchers, with the bulk of its studies being published outside sport journals perhaps explains why it is not always regarded as...