Patterns of Bureaucracy in Intercollegiate Athletic Departments

Abstract

The objective of the current research was to verify the extent to which Gouldner’s (1954) three patterns of bureaucracy were prevalent in intercollegiate athletic departments. Single and multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) of the data provided by 907 coaches from all three NCAA divisions (ndivI= 322; ndivII= 277; ndivIII= 308) showed that structural relationships among goals, processes, and patterns of bureaucracy were invariant among all three groups of coaches. Substantively, the factor of developmental goals through developmental processes (Trail & Chelladurai, 2000) predicted positively the presence ofrepresentative bureaucracyandpunishment-centered bureaucracyand negatively the existence ofmock bureaucracy. This means that the more athletic departments emphasize academic values, the less the coaches perceive a pattern of loose coupling between rules and actual technical activities. Implications of these results for theory and practice were discussed.