Organizational performance of Olympic sport governing bodies: dealing with measurement and priorities

Abstract

It is widely recognized that the performance measurement of organizations should help them in their strategic decisions and in their capacity to evaluate their successes. This measurement is, however, lacking in sport governing bodies from the French speaking Community of Belgium (n = 56). This paper proposes a model to measure organizational performance by considering strategic objectives distributed among five main dimensions of sport, customers, communication and image, finance and organizational which are measured by quantitative performance indicators. The focus of the paper is on the governing bodies of Olympic sport (n = 27) and the model measures their missions and systemic goals. In addition, the priority the Chairs of 13 Olympic sport governing bodies attach to each dimension and each strategic objective is assessed. Finally, there is a discussion of the comparison of their priorities and their organizational performance, which leads to the identification of four strategic orientations.

A unified model of non-profit sport organizations performance: perspectives from the literature

“…Internal atmosphere is negatively correlated to (4) external communication and contacts (Koski, 1995). However, external communication and contacts is correlated to (5) financial independence and both of them are negatively correlated to (6) financial resources management (Winand et al, 2010). Investment in communication and partnerships might help reach financial independence, but seems to conflict with allocation of resources for members' activities.…”

“…Chelladurai et al (1987) highlighted (7) elite and (8) mass sport programs in reference to throughput. They considered and measured these as processes whereas other researchers (Koski, 1995;Papadimitriou, 2002;Winand et al, 2010) considered the quantity and quality of services offered to members and elite and defined them as output.…”

“…These refer to processes used by NPSOs in order to achieve their goals and to operate efficiently. Internal atmosphere (1) is assessed through the relationships between internal stakeholders (Bayle & Madella, 2002;Koski, 1995) whereas (2) organizational operating is understood as the quality and stability of functioning in reference to education, experience, reactivity and turnover (Bayle & Madella, 2002;Winand et al, 2010). Internal atmosphere is strongly correlated to organizational operating, showing a link between social atmosphere and the implication of internal stakeholders and the quality and stability of functioning (Bayle & Madella, 2002).…”

“…Considering strategic objectives and operational goals in multiple dimensions, Winand, Zintz, Bayle and Robinson (2010) proposed a quantitative model to measure the organizational performance of sport governing bodies in Belgium. Furthermore, the authors assessed, through internal stakeholders' perceptions, the priority of each dimension and each strategic objective for 13 Olympic sport governing bodies.…”

“…We reduced them to nine main stakeholders given that the same entities appear more than once. Dimensions of organizational performance emerge that have not been measured in literature, but that stakeholders deem critical.In the next step, we extracted the significant correlation coefficients found between the authors' organizational performance dimensions in five different articles (Bayle & Madella, 2002;Chelladurai et al, 1987;Koski, 1995;Papadimitriou, 2002;Winand et al, 2010). One hundred and thirty-six coefficients were highlighted.…”