An Assessment and Prioritization of Sport and Youth Manager's Skills in Mazandaran Province

The aim of this study was to evaluate and prioritize skills of Sport and Youth managers in Mazandaran province. Research method was descriptive-survey and in term of objective was practical. The population consisted of all employees and experts in Sport and Youth offices and 80 employees and 12 senior experts and experts were selected as the sample. A questionnaire with 21 items derived from Fardi Azar (2001) questionnaire assessed the skill of managers. Validity of this questionnaire was confirmed by 10 professors and experts and its reliability was calculated by Cronbach’s alpha test (α=0.89). TOPSIS method was used to assess the skills of managers and AHP-FUZZY method to calculate the weight or importance coefficient of each factor of sports manager's skills. The findings showed that manger's skills were prioritized as follows: conceptual skills (strategic and long –term goals, awareness of laws and regulations), human skills (effective listening, influencing people) and technical skills (authority, resource allocation). According to these results,educating of sport managers and nurturing and enhancing the abovementioned factors in each skill are solutions to increase the performance of managers in this sample.