Assessing the perceived importance and difficulty of implementing good governance principles in national sport federations

Research Questions: Little is known about how organizational actors who have assumed the responsibility of implementing good governance principles perceive their task. The study attempted to fill this gap by posing two interrelated questions: Do these organizational actors perceive codified governance principles as being important for raising the governance standards in their organizations? Do they consider these codified governance principles a difficult undertaking to exercise? Methodology: Underpinned by the tenets of the institutional perspective, the study draws on goal-setting theory to measure the perceived importance and difficulty of implementing good governance within national sport federations. It employed a quantitative research design, collecting 268 responses from board members and paid staff from 26 European countries. Data were treated with IBM SPSS 28, while the principles were tested for internal consistency using Cronbach's alpha. Findings: While transparency, accountability, and democratic processes were important and relatively easy to implement, social responsibility was considered the most important principle. Paid staff perceived implementing these principles as significantly less difficult than board members. The principles perceived as more important are easier to implement than those perceived as less important. There is a consensus that the four examined principles constitute an important set of governance proxies that are not difficult to implement. Contributions: The study moves away from the ‘governance debate’ and focuses on what sport governance looks like in practice. It does so by going beyond single cases that illustrate how political governance (through codification) influences organizational governance by examining the perceptions of organizational actors from several European countries.