Complexity Of Leadership: Swanson And Kent

Sports organizations are dependent upon their employee’s attitude as well as work ethic. This is influenced by leadership and how employees view their leaders and coaches. In a recent article entitled “The complexity of leading in sport: Examining the role of domain expertise in assessing leader credibility and prototypicality”, Steve Swanson and Aubrey Kent propose that employee’s evaluations of their leaders are dependent on their perceived level of credibility as well as theories of leadership. They propose that simply being in a managerial position does not necessarily make that person a leader. A true leader comes from the respect they receive from employees. Swanson and Kent propose that employees’ opinions of a manager’s credibility

This means that the more credible the leader is perceived to be by their employee, the more likely the employee will be to accept information from them. Credible leaders are often more believable, have more experience, and an increased level of training. These factors add to the manager’s expertise. However, Swanson and Kent state that credibility also is also gained through trustworthiness. Managers must follow through with promises as well as act with goodwill and

They propose that sports leaders in particular must have an extra amount of domain specific expertise that is separate from functional expertise in order to have the same amount of influence over their employees. Functional expertise deals more with knowledge about the organization itself and includes knowledge that is specific to industry and profit. Domain specific expertise on the other hand deals with knowledge and experience that is specifically related to the sport. This in particular plays a more important role in the employee’s perceptions of credibility and prototypically of its leaders. In order to test this theory, Swanson and Kent set up two different experiments including samples of professional sport employees and managers. A survey was given to employees and asked them to rank sports managers based on functional area expertise and sport domain expertise. The second study wished to examine the perceived importance of the specific aspects of the sport domain expertise such as sport knowledge, experience, and skill. A separate survey was given to participants in order to determine the importance of leadership attributes including sport domain