Administrative Behavior of Women Athletic Directors in Successful and in Unsuccessful Intercollegiate Athletic Programs in the United States
The problem. The specific problem of this study was to compare administrative behavior of women athletic directors in successful and in unsuccessful intercollegiate athletic programs in the United States. It was hypothesized that the results of the study would reveal no differences in the administrative behavior of women athletic directors representative of successful and unsuccessful programs. Procedure. The 79 women athletic directors in universities of over 15,000 students were invited by mail to participate in this study. Of these, 62, returned the “Preliminary Data Sheet” (PDS), indicating their willingness to participate. The PDS was designed to obtain background information to be used in the comparison of the successful and unsuccessful programs and the athletic directors in these programs. A questionnaire entitled “Women’s Intercollegiate Athletic Directors Survey” was sent to the 62 directors, of whom 30 were identified as representative of successful programs and 32 as representative of unsuccessful programs. Identification was based on the scope of the programs the win-loss records. Three test measures were included in the questionnaire: a Leadership Opinion Questionnaire (LOQ), designed to measure a leader’s orientation around structure and consideration; a Responsibility, Authority, and Delegation Scale (RAD), designed to measure perceived responsibility, authority, and delegation; and a Work Analysis Form (WAF), designed to measure time spent in various administrative tasks. Three approaches were used in analyzing the data; comparison of majority responses of directors representative of successful and unsuccessful programs to individual items; application of the chi square test to measure differences between responses of directors representative of successful and unsuccessful programs; and the comparison of mean scores of directors representative of successful and unsuccessful programs on the two areas covered by the LOQ and the tree areas covered by the RAD. Findings. The findings of this study supported the hypothesis that there were no differences in the administrative behavior of women athletic directors representative of successful and unsuccessful programs. Results from the PDS revealed many similarities in directors representative of successful and unsuccessful programs. However, a pronounced difference appeared in that sixty-seven percent of those in the successful group had completed work at the doctoral level, as opposed to thirty-one percent of those in the unsuccessful group. The mean scores of the directors in successful programs were slightly greater than those of the directors in the unsuccessful program in both dimensions on the LOQ. Both groups scored considerably higher on the consideration dimension than on the structure dimension. Only two of the forty items in the LOQ elicited responses that revealed statistically significant differences between the two groups. The mean scores of the directors in successful programs were considerably higher than the mean scores of directors in unsuccessful programs in all three areas measured by the RAD. Of the twelve responses on the RAD, two elicited statistically significant differences in the two groups. In the portion of the WAF relating to time spent in contact with persons, a statistically significant difference was found on two of the items. No statistically significant differences were found on the items relating to time spent in major responsibilities. In the area relating to time spent in individual effort, a statistically significant difference was found on one item. Conclusions. More similarities than differences were found to exist in the administrative behavior of women athletic directors representative of successful and unsuccessful programs. It appears at this point in time therefore that factors in addition to the administrative behavior of the athletic director would account for the success or lack of success in a women’s athletic program at the university level.
Women--Employment, School management and organization, College sports--Management
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