The Interplay of Organizational Demography and Institutional Change

Our paper analyzes the interplay of organizational demography with the propensity to adopt an innovative practice. In particular, we examine how the demographical composition of professional German football teams influenced the adoption of the chain-defense-system (?Viererkette?) as well as the success of implementing this system. In doing so we strongly believe that the underlying relationship between organizational demography and the innovation diffusion process is not only relevant for football teams: Other smaller organizations or profit centers whose team structures seem comparable to those of football teams might be subject to similar processes. We hypothesize that a high level of team heterogeneity leads to a greater propensity to change. We also hypothesize that homogeneous teams are more successful in executing a new practice once they have overcome their skepticism. Our results support the hypotheses on change, but do not provide final support for our hypothesis on performance.