Advising elite performers: the role of intuition, trust and expertise

Purpose: Decision makers often struggle to combine advice with their own intuition. This study examines how advice-giver traits and decision-makers’ intuition, influence advice uptake. We present a novel typology based on decision-makers’ trust in advice-givers and their perceived expertise.
Design/ Methodology/ Approach: We include the mediation by decision makers’ intuitive competence (ability to effectively deploy intuition in interface with advice) and their autonomy (self-endorsement from past performance). Publicly available interview data with a sample of 51 elite performers are examined.
Findings: We identify four sources of advice: mentor advice, specialist advice, confidant advice and commentator advice. Drawing on instances of different sources of advice along varying trust and expertise levels, we provide a framework for interaction between institutional competence and advice characteristics.
Originality: Our findings help reconcile some contradictions in decision-making research. We offer practical guidance for the uptake of advice. This is also novel by way of contextualising nuanced forms of advice and providing a structured typology of sources, characterized by trust and expertise.