Knowledge sharing among coaches: expert power and social cognitive theory perspectives

ABSTRACT

Research question

Knowledge sharing among coaches plays a crucial role in learning. Although knowledge sharing is a significant management issue for national sport organisations (NSOs) and sport clubs, there is a lack of understanding of how coaches of one organisation share knowledge with coaches of another. To assist such understanding, our study examined knowledge sharing between NSO coaches (i.e. national team coaches) and local coaches (i.e. local club team coaches certified by a national organisation) in Japan by drawing on expert power and social cognitive theory. This study explored the following questions: How does the expert power of NSO coaches affect knowledge sharing among local coaches? How do local coaches’ trust and self-efficacy affect knowledge-sharing?

Research methods

We administered a survey to local sports coaches in Japan. Data were collected from 295 local coaches and analysed using structural equation modelling.

Results and findings

Results supported a direct association between expert power and local coaches’ intention to share knowledge. In addition, this relationship was mediated by coaches’ cognition-based trust and knowledge-sharing self-efficacy.

Implications

Our findings illuminate the knowledge diffusion perspective, which indicates that interactions between NSO and local coaches propagate knowledge among local coaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Elite sport
• coach’s social power
• cognition-based trust
• knowledge-sharing self-efficacy
• coaching knowledge management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author note

We made this manuscript by revising Dr. Funasaki's doctoral thesis.