• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.117-129
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• 2023

Organizations must seek change in order to adapt to environmental changes and achieve better performance. However, despite this obvious statement, empirical analysis has been almost non-existent due to the difficulty of manipulating organizational performance or change. In this study, we overcame these limitations and analyzed the causes and effects of organizational change by assuming a professional sports team as a venture company, which is relatively easy to objectively measure and evaluate organizational change or performance. We systematically collected and preprocessed traditional and advanced metrics of National Basketball Association (NBA) statistics along with preprocessed trade data from eight years of regular seasons (2014~2015-2021~2022) to analyze our research model. Assessment of process macro model 7 derives the following empirical result. The results of the empirical analysis depict that NBA teams with low organizational performance in the previous season are more likely to make organizational changes through player trades to improve performance. Into the bargain player trades mediate the static relationship between the winning percentage in the previous season and the winning percentage in the current season. However, the indirect effect of a team's previous season's performance on player trades appears to vary depending on the current situations and context of each NBA team. Teams that made the playoffs in the previous season tend to make fewer trades than teams that did not and the previous season's performance is highly correlated with the current season's performance. On the other hand, teams that did not make the playoffs in the previous season tend to make a relatively larger amount of player trades in total, and the mediating effect of trades vanishes in this case. In other words, teams that did not make the playoffs in the previous season experience a larger change in performance due to trades than teams that made the playoffs, even if they achieved the same winning percentage. This empirical analysis of the inverse relationship between organizational change and the performance of professional sports teams has both theoretical and practical implications in the field of sports industry and management by analyzing the fundamentals of organizational change and the performance of professional sports teams.