Signaling Quality Across Different Stages of the Organizational Life Cycle

Sport clubs are increasingly shifting from non-profit organizations to business companies, making professional sports one of the most important and top-selling industries (Chadwick 2009). Like other business companies, sports clubs battle for customers and aim at gaining their commitment (Decrop and Derbaix 2010). With respect to antecedents of commitment, researchers have examined, for example, sports clubs’ competitive performance. However, the future performance of sports clubs is very uncertain (Sainam, Balasubramanian and Bayus 2010) and characterized by “product-quality” information asymmetry between clubs and fans (Chen, Ganesan and Liu 2009). Therefore, customers in such markets look for signals of the club’s future performance.