What are the predominant behaviors of Iran's senior sports managers? A behavioral experiment with MACTOR

In today's world of instability, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, and despite the low-probability and high-impact surprises that lead to unpredictable changes, Iran’s sport needs managers who can analyze the environment of full of fluctuations by using intrinsic and acquired behaviors, and show the appropriate behavior at the right time and adopt the correct strategies.The purpose of this article is analyzing of the behavior of Iran’s senior sports managers and to fill the gap in our understanding of recognizing the types of behavior among senior managers in selected educational, public, championship and professional sports organizations separately. This was done by a behavioral experiment with actor analysis technique and by a strategic planning simulation tool called MACTOR. Data were collected through the participatory observation; By a purposeful selection, 11 sports management experts and 24 people employed or familiar with the 12 organizations studied in this study participated in this behavioral experiment and completed the actor-actor and actor-objective matrices. Convergence and divergence of actors and objectives were carefully examined with software. It was found that political, guiding and MACTOR supportive behaviors are the predominant behaviors of senior sports managers in Iran. It seems that the managers of sports organizations can make positive changes in their future behavior based on past experiences, but successive changes in these organizations will cause missing this opportunity.