Developing organisational ambidexterity in sport organisations? A qualitative study of a mentor programme for young leaders

Abstract

This article explores the position of organisational ambidexterity in a Norwegian mentor programme for young leaders in sport. It examines to what degree it enabled participants to reflect on two main themes in theories of organisational ambidexterity: to sense the possibility for, and/or seise, actual change opportunities within their own sport organisations. Drawing upon 22 in-depth interviews (14 mentees, split into 10 males and 4 females), six mentors (3 males and 3 females), and two female programme organisers, two key findings emerged. First, the mentor programme provided a useful arena for improving the mentees’ self-awareness of the type of leaders they would like to become. Second, the programme fell short of addressing the educational preconditions for ambidextrous leadership as the ability to solve work-life challenges requires insight into the contextual factors that influence leadership practices in sports. The article introduces Time, Agency and Change as conceptual additions to the theory and application of ‘organisational ambidexterity’ in sport management work. These additions improve the analytical usefulness of organisational ambidexterity in studies of sport organisations and itemise its applicability to further mentor programme developments.

Keywords:

• Leadership development
• mentoring
• contextual awareness
• organisational innovation

Introduction

When it comes to balancing tradition and values with the need to adapt to changing circumstances and innovate organisationally all leadership groups have a challenge. In management and organisational studies this challenge is often examined through the concept of ‘organisational ambidexterity’. It symbolises the organisation’s need ‘to engage in sufficient exploitation to ensure its current viability and, at the same time, devote enough energy to exploration to ensure future viability’ (Levinthal & March, 1993, p. 105). This concept is, however, rarely used in sport leadership studies, something which needs to be remedied because sport organisations are ‘hybrids’. Hybrid organisations combine elements from private, civil, and public sector (Lucassen & de Bakker, 2016), and need ambidextrous leadership to manoeuvre mission-driven and market-driven logics (Maine et al., 2021). This article therefore contributes to the sport leadership field by exploring how a mentor programme may stimulate ‘organisational ambidexterity’ among young leaders in sport.

A major element in theories of organisational ambidexterity is whether leaders are able 1) to sense changes in the organisation and 2) to seise the opportunity to do something about them (O’Reilly & Tushman, 2011) The research question is thus as follows: How does a mentor programme for young leaders in sport enable them to sense the possibility for, or seise actual change opportunities within their own sport organisations as part of their leadership skills? The programme examined in this article was initiated by The Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports (NIF) and the Norwegian Association of Student Sports (NSI) in 2017, to which the theoretical concept of ‘organisational ambidexterity’ was intended to be of relevance. The reason for starting this mentor programme was a desire from the organisers to nurture sport leadership talents ‘from within’ and make the leadership of Norwegian sport organisations more diverse. Since 2017, 60 young sport leaders aged 19–29 have participated in the mentor programme. They have been selected by the organisers on the basis of personal applications supported by the organisation they represent.

Participation in the programme is moreover meant to give access to power structures and insight into the cultural norms of Norwegian sport. Although rooted in a broader view of the development of sport management, these goals relate specifically to the organisation of Norwegian sport, in which NIF is a historically important element in maintaining ‘the Norwegian model of sport’ (Den norske idrettsmodellen), which the mentor programme’s co-organiser the Norwegian Association of Student Sports (NSI) also adheres to. Although more of an ideal type than a blueprint, this model includes four elements: a tradition of volunteering, a close relationship between the sport sector and the political authorities, a preference for egalitarian values, and, as with NIF, a unitary organisational structure (Tuastad, 2019). The last element is particularly important as NIF organises all national sports federations in Norway. In 2021, NIF has approximately 2,100,000 members, and consists of 55 national federations, 11 regional confederations, around 375 sports councils and nearly 11,000 clubs.

To continue the development of this unitary model, NIF sees organisational innovation as necessary (NIF, 2019) and the mentor programme as a tool to achieve this. The programme integrates perspectives on leadership in sport, where leaders typically engage in daily interactions with their employees and volunteers, with those of leadership of sport, where leaders are focussing on strategy, vision and values (Arthur et al., 2017). Drawing on the works of David Clutterbuck in particular (Clutterbuck et al., 2017), according to the organisers, the mentoring part of the programme is designed to boost the psycho-social enhancement and career development trajectories of individuals. To achieve this, the programme is organised in three weekends, which are based on these three themes: (1) Myself as leader, (2) Leading through others, and (3) Leading organisations. Whereas the general learning outcome for the mentees during these gatherings drew upon case work, lectures and collaboration in groups, each mentee also had a unique mentor, paired by the programme organisers in an attempt to match the mentors’ experience with the mentees’ goals as stated in their application to the programme.

To analyse how this mentor programme stimulated organisational ambidexterity among young sport leaders, this article proceeds with an explanation of our key concepts – organisational ambidexterity and mentoring – before we turn to methods and materials used. Then we present the findings organised into two themes: whether the participants felt better prepared upon completion of the programme to sense and seise changes in the organisation and what the organisers and mentors thought about this. Based on these findings, we end the article with suggestions about how to specify contextual factors crucial to organisational ambidexterity in upcoming editions of the mentor programme and future studies of this analytic combination.

The concept of organisational ambidexterity

An influential doctrine in organisational studies is that organisations should be capable of simultaneously exploiting existing competencies and exploring new opportunities (Raisch et al., 2009: 685; see also Birkinshaw et al., 2016; Duncan, 1976; March, 1991; O’Reilly & Tushman, 2011). While some meta-studies indicate that organisations striving towards this ideal do better than organisations that do not (Fourné et al. 2019; Luger, Raisch & Schimmer 2018), the potential side-effects of this strategy are well known. Leaders who desire a combination of both innovation and continuation in maintaining the organisation have long faced a challenge because the organisational structures and the choices that produce them may ‘demonstrate negative externalities that undermine the simultaneous delivery of both’ (Boumgarden et al., 2012, p. 588). Two approaches to this paradox are formulated as either ‘organisational vacillation’ or ‘organisational ambidexterity’ (Birkinshaw et al., 2016; Boumgarden et al., 2012). Proponents of the former approach make a distinction between the two by stating that:

with organizational ambidexterity, managers achieve high performance by deliberately emphasizing a structure that promotes balance in exploration and exploitation, whereas with vacillation, managers achieve high performance by dynamically vacillating between structures (Boumgarden et al., 2012, p. 588).

In practice, though, the conceptual difference between ‘organisational vacillation’ and ‘organisational ambidexterity’ is less pronounced than the difference in how these concepts are operationalised as drivers of leadership. Based on Raisch et al. (2009) one could argue that which of the concepts to use in analysing organisational development relies primarily on how it addresses four core tensions in organisational development. The first relates to whether an organisation should separate exploitative and explorative activities into distinct organisational units to accomplish ambidexterity, or integrate them within the same organisational unit. The second tension addresses the question of whether the key to ambidexterity lies in the individual or at the organisational level. The third tension is whether adopting a certain configuration (static) or focussing the adaptive abilities of the organisation (dynamic) is the best pathway to ambidexterity. The fourth tension regards the ‘interrelations between internal and external knowledge processes that play an important role in corporate renewal’ (Raisch et al., 2009, p. 686), which, in the context of sport organisations, becomes increasingly important given the growing complexity of their stakeholder networks. Should every challenge related to ambidexterity be resolved internally, or would it be beneficial to outsource certain tasks?

Due to the emphasis in ‘organisational ambidexterity’ in balancing exploration and exploitation to tensions like those above, earlier studies related to sport management in general and mentoring in sport seem to support our view that it is better suited than vacillation as the ideal type for future sport leaders to address (Leeder & Cushion, 2020; NASME, 2019; Scholz & Stein, 2017). The reason is that keeping the balance between exploitation and exploration is embedded in sport federations as part of their changing mandate. Since the millennium shift, sport has taken on new responsibilities, such as environmental sustainability. Sport organisations have also paid more attention to leadership development, partly as a consequence of corruption scandals and integrity challenges in several sport governing bodies (Ferkins et al., 2018; Peachey et al., 2015). What is more, sport federations carry a set of values and principles which in combination with the direct influence from its members and indirect influence from international sporting bodies affect their options for institutional entrepreneurship – ‘activities of actors who have an interest in particular institutional arrangements and who leverage resources to create new institutions or to transform existing ones’ (Maguire et al., 2004, p. 657). Since any type of organisation ‘demands its own distinct and complementary set of elements regarding structure, incentives, and culture’ (Boumgarden et al., 2012, p. 588), these options can, in the case of sport, vary between countries, size and type of federations (Winand et al. 2016).

Thus, in a specific leadership development context, such as in federations that are part of NIF it becomes necessary to acknowledge this balancing act between conserving tradition and stimulating innovation. Two generally important criteria for coping with that kind of challenge, according to O’Reilly and Tushman (2011, p. 6), are that leaders are ‘able to accurately sense changes in their competitive environment, including potential shifts in technology, competition, customers, and regulation’, and second, ‘they must be able to act on these opportunities and threats; to be able to seise them by reconfiguring both tangible and intangible assets to meet new challenges’ (italics original). However, the pairing of organisational ambidexterity and mentoring is rare in organisational studies (see Karthikeyan, 2015, for an exception), and even rarer in sport leadership research (we found no studies explicitly linking the two). Yet, as it can be argued that these abilities are a crucial element of how change is enacted and preservation is decided in sport management positions, it is reasonable that a mentoring programme addresses its relevance – especially considering the characteristics of sport in Norway and Scandinavia vis-à-vis other organisations in business or politics.

Mentoring: a critical review

Whilst scholarly interest in the role of mentoring is often linked to studies by Kanter (1977) and Roche (1979), Kram (1983; 1985) is often seen as the first to provide a systematisation of the function of mentoring programmes and their impact on the psycho-social enhancement and career development trajectories of individuals. Both processes Kram identified were assumed to give access to power structures and insight into cultural norms in organisations, which would serve the aims of both the individual in question and those of the organisation. Since then, mentoring has grown rapidly as a research field across various disciplines and sectors (Allen & Eby, 2010, p. 7). Mentoring has spread into academia (Chester & Mondello, 2012), non-profit organisations (Coers et al., 2021), the public sector (Bozeman & Feeney, 2009), the media (Festing et al., 2015), and sports (Beres & Dixon, 2014; Chester & Mondello, 2012; Jones et al., 2009; Leberman, 2017; Weaver & Chelladurai, 1999). Along the way, a common understanding of ‘mentor’ and ‘mentoring’ has emerged, offering slight variations on Kram’s (1983, p. 24) definition: ‘a process in which a more experienced person serves as a role model, and provides guidance and support to a developing novice, and sponsors that novice in his/her career progress’ (see also Allen & Eby, 2010; Bower, 2009; Clutterbuck et al., 2017; Comeaux, 2010; Mullen & Klimaitis, 2021).

Alongside this growth, five categories of criticism have emerged. The first category concerns the limits of a ‘one size fits all’ logic which does not account for the specific role demands and professional requirements of future leaders in different sectors of society (Allen et al., 2009). Several studies (see reviews by Clutterbuck & Lane, 2004; Mullen & Klimaitis, 2021) refer to Kram’s early research in adapting the four ‘predictable, yet not entirely distinct’ (Kram, 1983, p. 614) phases of development: ‘phases-initiation, cultivation, separation, and redefinition.’ Unfortunately, the application of Kram’s research often overlooks its methodological approach as well as the timeline needed to exploit the mentoring benefits. Based on qualitative interviews with leaders aged 26–34, Kram envisions a ten-year period to cover all four phases, which makes this approach less relevant to gathering-based programmes like the Norwegian case presented in this article. In addition, this linear process does not necessarily suit the needs of those who participate in the mentor programme, nor does it necessarily fit with the mentor’s idea of aiding personal development.

The second category of criticism relates to whether the mentor’s competence matches the needs of the mentee, and whether this match (or lack of one) is suited to the specific mentoring exercises involved. In particular, the pairing of mentor and mentee is becoming a tall order given the findings from Denmark and Klara (2010), who identified nine career and psychosocial mentor functions: sponsorship; exposure and visibility; coaching; protection; challenging assignments; role modelling; acceptance and confirmation; counselling; and friendship/mutuality (Denmark & Klara, 2010, p. 4). Moreover, Allen et al. (2009) claim that there are no best-practice examples on pre-matching because people are different and that a relationship that in the beginning might seem fruitless, may turn into a mutually enriching experience and vice-versa. However, in light of Farmer’s (2005, p. 138) claim that ‘effective communication is considered a hallmark of effective mentoring relationships’, it would be reasonable to expect a focus on this. Yet, empirical studies continue to show inability to communicate as the reason for failed mentoring relationships (Rosselot-Merritt & Bloch, 2020).

The third category of criticism asks whether mentor programmes reproduce the status quo, as neither programme design nor mentoring can be separated from the epistemological roots of the learning outcomes. While research has proven that the norms, backgrounds and implementation tactics of mentors in general affect the outcome (Kochan et al., 2015; Leeder & Cushion, 2020), one consequence of not taking this element into account is particularly visible in discussion of diversity. Hansman (2002) criticised formal mentoring programmes which, despite the impact that gender, race, class, ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation and issues of power may have on the mentoring relation, ‘may not address the individual needs of the protégés, but instead reflect the power and interests inherent within organisations’ (Hansman, 2002, p. 39; Rayburn et al., 2010). Of these individual traits, the gender dimension has been particularly researched. By reproducing a masculine worldview of personal development, knowledge and leadership qualities, researchers claim that, intentionally or unintentionally, many mentor programmes reinforce gender inequality rather than empowering the participants (Bower, 2009; Burke & McKeen, 1990). For sport in particular, Hovden (2010, p. 189) claims that ‘certain forms of masculinity and stereotyped notions of gender are an integral part of the dominant leadership discourses in sport organisations.’

The fourth category of criticism concern the instrumentality of mentor programmes, which together with a quantitative focus on indicator-based evaluations, may create a false impression of efficiency. Mentoring is seen as human resource development ‘intervention that assists employees in career advancement, serves as a form of on-the-job training, and helps create learning organisations’ (Hegstad & Wentling, 2004, p. 423). However, research on the intervention effects shows mixed results. Comparing groups with and without mentors, Underhill (2006) found that mentoring does improve career outcomes for individuals, but informal mentoring produced a more significant effect on career outcomes than formal mentoring. Another meta-study by Eby et al. (2008) quantitatively reviewed the three major areas of mentoring research (youth, academic, workplace) and found that mentoring is associated with a wide range of favourable behavioural, attitudinal, health-related, relational, motivational and career outcomes, although the effect is generally small. Other studies, moreover, show no significant differences between protégés with male mentors and protégés with female mentors, or between perceived similarities on the measured variables – even though respondents have emphasised an easier identification with female role models (Burke, Burgess & Fallon, 2006; Høigaard & Mathisen, 2009).

The fifth category of criticism recognises that mentor programmes may create leadership awareness but with a limited applicability. This kind of criticism affects the utilisation of the agency-structure dimension to reach set goals which more or less explicitly underlies mentoring programmes (Griffiths & Armour, 2012). Overcoming the agency-structure dualism and enabling action is to a large degree context-dependent (Haslett, 2012; Manning, 2008). Considering the argument that ‘sport as a societal institution that is conceptually separate from those stakeholders that seek to benefit from its external effects, be it as industry or public policy’ (Gammelsaeter, 2021, p. 2), one may therefore question the relevance of mentoring research on business to other sectors like sport and their hybrid organisations (Lucassen & de Bakker, 2016). What is more, mentoring research within sport also reveals a notable difference. Previous research on mentoring and sports primarily focus on athlete-coach relation (Beres & Dixon, 2014; Chester & Mondello, 2012; Jones et al., 2009; Leberman, 2017; McQuade et al., 2015; Weaver & Chelladurai, 1999), which is less relevant for examining organisational ambidexterity in sport federations.

The Norwegian programme organisers consequently face several challenges at once. Not only should they avoid the flaws in prior mentoring programmes, but they should also identify issues which, through mentoring, enable mentees to enhance their ambidextrous leadership capabilities in a sport context. To account for how this challenge was explored in this study, we now turn to materials and methods used.

Materials and methods

This study has explored experiences with mentor programmes that do not easily translate to survey indexes (Merrick, 2017). At the same time, the theory of ‘organisational ambidexterity’ provided guidance on what kind of insights we assumed would be useful to sport leaders and how to sort people’s experiences from the mentor programme into analytical categories. This led to an abductive approach which, in case studies, combines inductive and deductive elements ‘as a means of inferring new theory or the development of existing theory’ (Conaty, 2021, p. 5). As an abductive approach can be operationalised in various ways (Tavory & Timmermanns, 2014), this article draws upon Alvesson and Sköldberg (2018) emphasis on how a study ‘alternates between (previous) theory and empirical facts (or clues) whereby both are successively reinterpreted in the light of each other’ (p. 5).

This study relies on qualitative, semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 22 people involved in a Norwegian mentor programme for young leaders in sport. After obtaining ethical approval from the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD), we contacted all programme developers, mentors and mentees from the 2019 to 2020 edition of the programme (44 people in total) with the offer to participate. In the end, a sample of 14 participants (10 men and 4 women), six mentors (3 men and 3 women), and two (out of two) programme organisers agreed to take part. The mentees either had positions in NIF, one of the sport-specific federations that are part of NIF, sport clubs, or in student sport associations. The mentors had experience from sport, business, politics and the media (Table 1).

Table 1. Informants.

Role	Pseudonym	Gender
Mentor	Andrine	Female
Mentor	Andreas	Male
Mentor	Turid	Female
Mentor	Beatrice	Female
Mentor	John	Male
Mentor	Tom	Male
Mentee	David	Male
Mentee	Gunnar	Male
Mentee	Jenny	Female
Mentee	Georg	Male
Mentee	Peter	Male
Mentee	Astrid	Female
Mentee	Ronald	Male
Mentee	Ole	Male
Mentee	Nils	Male
Mentee	Jonas	Male
Mentee	Amanda	Female
Mentee	Samuel	Male
Mentee	Mari	Female
Organiser	Anna	Female
Organiser	Solveig	Female

Methodological trustworthiness has been sought in two ways. The first deals with procedural dimensions like credibility, confirmability and transferability. These dimensions were operationalised as follows: because of restrictions imposed by Covid-19, the authors conducted interviews via the Microsoft Teams video conference tool during two weeks in the spring of 2020. Rather than conventional in-depth interviews, they took the form of structured conversations lasting on average 49 minutes stemming from the principles of ‘the focussed interview’ (Merton & Kendall, 1946; Merton et al., 1990; Selltiz et al., 1976). The use of the focussed interview as a qualitative method was designed to determine the responses of people exposed to a situation previously analysed by the investigator. A prior assessment of the situation in which subjects had been involved was therefore a methodological necessity in line with our abductive approach, and helps substantiate our claim in the introduction to this paper that the ability to handle organisational ambidexterity in sport organisations is one of the key challenges for tomorrow’s sport leaders.

Unlike Merton and his colleagues, we do not claim to ‘readily distinguish the objective facts of the case from the subjective definitions of the situation’ (Merton et al., 1990, p. 4). Exactly because the focussed interview underlines the importance of grasping the ‘subjective experiences of persons exposed to the pre-analysed situation in an effort to ascertain their definitions of the situation’ (italics original) (Merton et al., 1990, p. 3), the aim of the revised interview form was to get a richer picture of episodes and incidents central to the mentor programme in the context of organisational ambidexterity. In particular, Merton and Kendall (1946, p. 24) focus on retrospection as a technique, which encourages ‘stimulus-linked and detailed responses by helping the interviewee to recall his immediate reactions to the material rather than to re-consider the stimulus situation and report his present reactions to it’ (italics original). Prepared with this apparatus, both researchers conducted individual interviews with all groups of informants and individual informants were distributed randomly among us. We shared an identical interview guide with 10 open-ended questions. These questions centred on topics connecting the context of Norwegian sport and organisational ambidexterity with the content and implementation of the mentor programme.

The second aspect of methodological trustworthiness includes interpretative dimensions like authenticity, plausibility, and criticality. To that end, a ‘directed content analysis’ was performed. According to Hsieh and Shannon (2005) this refer to a content analysis of qualitative data where existing theory help focus the research question, provide analytical categories and the relationships between them, and finally guide the discussion of findings. The mentees and mentors were interviewed first, then the programme organisers. Whereas the interviews with mentors and mentees aimed to uncover the relation between organisational ambidexterity and their experiences with the programme, the intention of interviewing the programme organisers was to grasp how the overall aims with the programme related to the experiences of the mentors and mentees. The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, and the content of these conversations was subsequently coded by each researcher into either in the ‘sense’ or ‘seise’ theme, following the theoretical divide by O’Reilly and Tushman (2011). Practically, this meant selecting words or phrases from the transcripts and categorising them based on an assessment of whether they were negatively or positively linked with each of the two theory-based themes introduced above.

To ensure that our interpretations of this pattern in the data were not products of our own ‘imagination’ (Lincoln & Guba, 1985, p. 243), inter-rater reliability was operationalised through intercoder reliability and intercoder agreement. Following Smith and McGannon (2018, p. 109) this means that the researchers met with each other to come to an agreement over the codes to ensure that their coding was reliable. In light of Tracy’s (2010) note on assessing the multivocality of qualitative data as part of achieving trustworthiness, we sought intercoder agreement by discussing what the informants actually meant and not just what they said in the transcripts. During this phase, the researchers compared transcripts and listened to each other’s recordings to achieve a common interpretation of the coding. This enabled us to re-sort the content under the ‘sense’ and 'seise’ themes, where we found that, rather than developing further thematic categories, organising it into narrative lines of experiences worked better as a representation of findings. In line with the abductive approach, the object of these steps was to reach argumentative validation, which is to present the findings in a way that conclusions may be followed and tested (Sarantakos, 2013) in order to strengthen the interpretation of case accounts (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2018).

As a final measure, ‘member reflections’ (Tracy, 2010, p. 844) were conducted with the programme organisers after the interviews with mentors and mentees. Member reflections include ‘sharing and dialoguing with participants about the study’s findings, and providing opportunities for questions, critique, feedback, affirmation, and even collaboration’ (Tracy, 2010, p. 844). Some of the mentees were more eloquent than others, and we also discovered different motivations among for applying to the programme among them. We therefore included only programme organisers in these member reflections in order to minimise taken-for-granted assumptions and biases about the intention of the programme. The reason was that in order to mediate between theory and data, and to iteratively use findings to clarify theory as well as use theory to explain findings, the case serving as ‘testing ground’ must be clear to the researchers (Blaikie, 2010). In the next two sections we present our findings.

Findings I: sensing the need for change

The mentees unanimously emphasised that the ability to create changes in Norwegian sport is dependent on individual leadership skills, and that the Mentor programme enabled the mentees to be better prepared – in other words, sense the need for change – than prior to participation. The increasing competition for time and attention from members, funding sources, volunteers, potential new members, spectators and so forth was recognised by several respondents as noticeably more important, creating changes in many areas of society, including within leadership of sport organisations. Ole, one of the mentees, said it was very useful to discuss these challenges and possible solutions with both fellow mentees and mentors, and to learn from the way others worked to handle the challenges in their respective sports, balancing historical approaches and the new opportunities. One example given by Mari, another mentee, was how they have struggled in recent years to ensure members’(other than the elected leaders) attendance at annual meetings: ‘However, this year many annual meetings had to be conducted as online meetings [due to the Covid-19 pandemic] and the number of participants actually increased significantly. Interesting - and hopefully something we can learn from going forward.’

Most mentees were, however, not particularly concerned about the special organisational status of sports as a complicating factor. A majority felt that the essence of the programme was in developing leadership qualities as such, and not, as Peter said, to ‘read up on the history and organisation of Norwegian sport’. A sense of what it would take to induce change still surfaced during the programme, as some of them pointed out that having a programme like this alone would generate change as it enabled young leaders to gain insight into various organisations and sectors associated with sport. Because young people were more eager to induce change than ‘the veterans’, the very fact that this programme existed would create awareness in organisations about what the young leaders may contribute. Some of the mentees pointed out that working to develop their sport from their roles as leaders in youth committees created both opportunities and obstacles; on the positive side, having like-minded young people to discuss possible changes with and get support from provided a higher level of confidence when introducing new matters to others.

As such, the programme created a form of ‘reverse mentoring’ (Murphy, 2012), where the mentor also learned from the mentee. At the same time, John, a mentor, described a certain tension between the ‘enthusiastic and unexperienced youngsters’ and the ‘experienced old guard who know how things are done around here’ when trying to address various matters. One mentee, Ronald, dismissed the possibility for radical change altogether, for example, related to digitalisation, as the majority of practices in Norwegian sport concerned day-to-day operations and offered little scope and resources to think about the future. Questioned about the reasons for this tension, some of the mentors, especially those from sport federations and the like, emphasised that leadership qualities had no merit unless people knew the values on which Norwegian sporting culture was built. This fits well with the findings from a study of sport management education needs in Norway: ‘Experienced managers we interviewed were concerned about young people who do not understand how democratic processes within Norwegian sports and politics function’ (Skirstad et al., 2019, p. 36).

One of the mentor programme’s long-term goals was in fact that the mentees stay longer in sport, and acquire bigger responsibilities and positions – or at least, return to leadership positions in sport later in life, should they choose to leave after their period as leaders in student sports expired. According to Anna, one of the organisers of the mentor programme, however, an interest in organisational innovation and contextual knowledgeability was not set as a premise for participation, although it might well be one of the results. The backdrop was that instead of feeding the mentees information about how to proceed and think ahead, the improved leadership skills and self-consideration that emerged through the mentoring were seen as an indirect source of institutional renewal. But if this had been a target from the beginning, Anna said, it might have clouded the learning potential of discovering the relevant paths towards ambidexterity. Moreover, the participants were not to blame for any lack of awareness of the context of Norwegian sports, argued Turid, one of the mentors, as NIF apparently had a long way to go before it could be considered a template for future leaders in that respect: ‘It is not like NIF’s law is all that matters and we don’t give a shit about the rest. But we behave like it is so, and communicate this way.’ [‘NIFs law’ is the nickname of the regulations that affect all members of the Norwegian Federation of Sports].

David, however, said that it became tedious to be reminded of this focus on sports along the way, which emphasised the finding that mentees had variable intentions of becoming sport leaders. Although required to write a motivational letter as part of their application to the programme, several of the mentees saw it rather as a stepping-stone towards leadership positions in general and as Andreas, one of the mentors, put it: ‘I think they thought it would look good on their CV.’ Other mentors, like Turid, ‘blamed’ the federations for this diverse motivation, as one mentor noted: ‘Some federations put people into the programme, and, you know, think that “check, now we have done our part of developing youngsters”.’ Even so, Anna, one of the organisers, saw the diversity of the programme participants as a positive opportunity to get them to realise their own limits and potential as leaders. Jenny, for example, saw the learning process, in which a productive mentor-mentee relation was essential in order for it to work properly, as more important than ticking all the boxes of what a mentor programme for young leaders should contain, given the challenges of contemporary sport organisations. As a result, rather than sharing experiences of what they had learned, several mentees emphasised how they had been introduced to the management of sports. Peter said that ‘we had some group assignments where there was an obvious clinch between efficiency and quality in terms of making a decision. Yet it also showed that a team needs different people to get the job done well.’

Findings II: seising change

While we found a mixed view of whether the participants felt enabled to sense change in modern sport, they felt far more confident in seising change if the opportunity came. At the same time, as with the sensing dimension, the actual seising of an opportunity to change was not dependent on knowledge of the Norwegian sport system. Rather, as emphasised by David, it was up to individual leaders to operationalise a potential for change. David spoke of the processes related to self-leadership in a way reminiscent of the classic definition by Manz (1991, p. 17): ‘a self-influence process and set of strategies that address what is to be done (e.g. standards and objectives) and why (e.g. strategic analysis) as well as how it is to be done’. Considering the goals from NIF/NSI that touch upon self-leadership, the participants were almost unanimous in their impression that the programme had made them more reflective as leaders.

For example, Georg said, ‘the programme is not that theoretical although the professional quality is high. It shapes you into the leader you can be, rather than telling you to read some article.’ The youth dimension was critical here. Some mentees implied that when young leaders get into board rooms and public arenas, they embody the leader role with new perspectives just by being there. The contingency is that the mentees continue in sport, which was not necessarily the case. The mentees from NSI especially, who are in higher education and have a position in student athletics organisations, were uncertain about their future careers. Anna, one of the organisers, however, hoped that the mentor programme would function as a pull factor for those who had no fixed position within sports in sight and that they would pursue a career related to the programme content. Yet, when it comes to ambidexterity, it is our impression that, although the special context of sport organisations is well integrated into the programme, it did not translate into a distinct sport leadership capacity which enabled participants to seise change.

Judging by the interviewees’ response to questions about the future challenges of sport leadership, the programme seems generally not designed for making people more ambidextrous in sport organisations – only adaptable to changes in general – and hence not necessarily specialised in renewing, for example, sport federations. Andrine pointed out that a partial explanation of this could be the programme’s triad of targets: ‘we should have covered less topics and instead examined some of them more thorough. I think it was a mismatch between what we started with and what we did when we were gathered.’ Turid, one mentors, claimed that ‘the value of the course lies in the leadership tools, not sporting perspectives per se. A lot of what we do can be used anywhere.’ Gunnar, one of the mentees, commented in a similar vein:

People are people, regardless of where they work or what they do (…) Learning to understand others and the effect I have on others, is not limited to sports - I take a lot of what I have learned in the programme with me into many other areas of my life.

Be that as it may, sport leaders in Norway have challenges related to commercialisation, law and democratic processes that business, for example, does not have to consider, as well as challenges stemming from the continual influence of the media and the legacy of the Norwegian model of sport. A crucial question is therefore whether this strengthening of young leaders’ self-concept, underpinned by leadership ideals central to Norwegian sports, is translated into organisational ambidexterity and ambidextrous leadership in those organisations in which mentees find themselves. Tom, one of the mentors, claimed that this was not an either-or situation:

It may be more motivating for those to attend if they are there to improve their selves. My impression was that some of the mentees were very concerned about the thoughts of the federation. That they were put there to make a difference on behalf of their federations. But it is not certain that this way is the best when it comes to reaching goals.

Others considered the answer to this question to be absolutely dependent on what caused the participants to enter the programme in the first place. Similar to the mentor quoted above, mentees Andrine, Peter and Tom mentioned a certain pressure from federations and their sponsoring organisations upon other mentees. As Peter said: ‘It did not bother me, but I think the other federations were, like, “this is what you are going to deliver on when you are done”.’ Solveig, one of the organisers, also mentioned the delicate matter of convincing federations to cover the costs for the participant, where the individual – rather than the organisational – benefits were emphasised. Here, we see a link to a dilemma of mentor programmes in general, as discussed in the critical review section above. As addressed by Leeder and Cushion (2020), a mentor programme staged by a national federation and with participants endorsed by their organisations may very well reproduce cultures and beliefs which could become a barrier to the new ideas and practices that the programme is designed to enable.

Conclusion

Our findings generate two conclusions about mentor programmes as a leadership development tool in the context of organisational ambidexterity in sport. The programme did promote a form of contextual ambidexterity and enable participants to heighten their chances for becoming leaders outside sports. On the other hand, little seems to indicate that the self-leadership skills that the mentees emphasised as valuable takeaways from the programme necessarily stimulate organisational progress, especially considering the nature of hybrid sport organisations, which was a key aim of the programme. Andreas, one of the mentors, put it well: ‘I think we could have focussed on the possibility that mentees got developmental assistance, and then talk more about how they can use their federation to reach their goals, or practise tricks to create changes.’ In particular, there was a lack of focus on three particulars of organisational ambidexterity which, in our overall interpretation of the informants’ experience of the programme, influence leadership development in sport: time, agency and change.

With regard to time, Duncan (1976) claimed that the creation of ‘dual structures’ in organisations required different time perspectives and management capabilities if they were to successfully resolve the conflict between alignment and adaptation. Despite this, and despite the fact that timeframes are used to categorise the level of organisational performance (Heracleous et al., 2017) and much of the everyday operation of sport federations, such as strategies and working programmes, is also tied to budgetary periods, this is not discussed in the mentor programme. This emphasis on time brings us to agency, which is understood here as relational ‘because how we act, the powers we accrue, or the constraints upon us, do not rest on our relation to an abstract structure but on the nature of our interdependence with others and how this shapes our mutual interactions’ (Burkitt, 2018, p. 526). This element is included here because of the mentor programme’s design and the mentees’ emphasis on individualisation of leadership, which runs counter to the growing focus on collaborative leadership as central to sport organisations (Ferkins et al., 2018). Finally, the reason for including a better understanding of what kind of change one must address is that unless it is specified in relation to time and agency, it becomes difficult to measure progress quantitatively or examine people’s experiences of these change processes qualitatively. For example, organisational changes can be enforced or voluntarily initiated, and they can be supported by representatives for sport-specific federations or other stakeholders (like sponsors).

To conclude, improved personal leadership skills – both in the form of ambidextrous leadership and contextual ambidexterity – have limited value if organisational specifications and the characteristics of the organisation’s societal circumstances are not considered. Hence, to improve the development of organisational ambidexterity through new editions of this and similar mentor programmes we have suggested adding three leadership-influencing factors to the mix: time, agency and change. For this reason, this article contributes to the sport leadership field by exploring the mentor programme as a leadership development tool in light of the organisational challenges in contemporary sport. At the same time, our focus on the Norwegian context constitutes a limitation to this study. To examine and specify the conceptual framework, we suggest doing comparative studies of mentor programmes in different countries as well as further case studies of individual mentor programmes to address the significance of the academic/applied platform on which they are built, the dynamic in the mentor-mentee relations, and the educational principles used.

Disclosure statement

There are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.