March Madness and perceived influences on workplace productivity by business professionals An exploratory study

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide practitioners of management and interested research a sense of how the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament is affecting worker productivity in the workplace. There are several positive and negative issues concerning how some employees are willing to spend work time following the NCAA tournament and related office gambling activities. Design/methodology/approach - A review of the applied literature on sports-related gambling and bracketing that is quite widespread in the USA and other countries was provided. The sample consisted of relatively well-paid professionals, who may routinely engage in office pools and most universally are involved in bracketing March Madness plays. This resulted in 145 useable questionnaires recording responses to 28 variables from an initial sampling frame of slightly over 200 potential respondents associated with a major Pittsburgh-based financial service provider. Factor analysis and multivariate statistical analysis were used to test several hypotheses. Findings - Management appears to be successfully delivering the message that office gambling activities harm productivity if management activity discourages office gambling, but there appears to be a trade-off as labor productivity may be slightly reduced on the short term, and employee cohesiveness may increase on the long term. It was also found that the degree of personal involvement is important; the more an employee is involved, the more negative the impact that March Madness activities will have on his/her productivity. Practical implications - March Madness is a time-honored tradition that many employees take for granted and will engage in regardless of the extrinsic controls that management may care to implement, making the extrinsic controls too expensive for a questionable return in enhanced labor productivity during March Madness. Originality/value - It is an interesting academic research question concerning the balance of productivity losses and gains in employee cohesiveness that warrants additional research in the intrinsic motivations of both management and their employees.