Adoption of good governance by national sporting associations: a Malaysian perspective

bin Astaman, A.A. (2017) Adoption of good governance by national sporting associations: a Malaysian perspective. Working Paper. Birkbeck Sport Business Centre, London, UK.

Abstract

This study was conducted to determine the extent to which good governance principles are understood and adopted by national sport associations, with a particular focus on Malaysia. The selection of this area is to fill a particular gap in the understanding of how good governance is experienced and where applicable, embraced by national sport organisations, which current literature shows to be dominated by a Western context. While the origins and contemporary developments of corporate and public governance is influenced heavily by ‘Anglo-American’ thinking and circumstances, the atypical nature of sporting organisations in national contexts suggests that a uniform experience of governance adoption therein to be quite unlikely, thus making this an interesting investigation. Due to the absence of an overarching theoretical or conceptual framework to understand good governance in national sport organisations, this study uses the inductive methodology of grounded theory, specifically the Gioia method (Gioia et. al., 2013), to empirically establish how good governance is perceived by insider and outsider informants from four different sports in Malaysia. Semi-structured interviews were the primary method of data collection, with documentary analysis as the secondary. Upon analysis, it was found that there was a basic understanding of good governance amongst the study’s subjects, that this paper contends to be attributable to the unique role of government in the development and delivery of modern sport in Malaysia. The study also found that unlike the West, this historical intertwining between sport and government has allowed Malaysian national sport organisations to be gradually exposed and persuaded on the ideals of good governance, without having gone through a ‘modernisation’ and ‘professionalisation’ phase. A framework that explores the relationship between the aggregated dimensions of the grounded data was also developed, and explains the adoption of good governance by national sporting organisations as phases of evolution in the Malaysian context. This paper establishes an alternate perspective on how good governance can be adopted in the administration of national sport, that is significantly different than the paths identified in the West, and may help spur similar research elsewhere, particularly in settings with a demonstrable history of government intervention in sport.

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