Déterminants de la performance organisationnelle des fédérations sportives : une analyse comparée des ligues sportives de la Communauté française de Belgique

(eng) Organizational performance is a central theme in organizational analysis. But how can organizations make their way towards high performance? We focus on the 56 sport governing bodies from the French speaking Community of Belgium. We emphasize the constituents of their organizational performance, that is their missions (elite sport, sport for all and customers missions) and their processes and skills we respectively measure and assess for 20 of them. Due to the small N-sample and the causal complexity inherent in this research, we perform a crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA) in order to identify the complex relations between these constituents. We highlight three combinations of key determinants linked with high performance. These are th three pathways according to which governing bodies might reach performance. The first one is being proactive. They should provide sport and non sport services to give added value to their members and elites. The second one is both to involve paid staff in the decision making processes and to develop a project shared by volunteers, paid staff and sport clubs. And the third one, for small governing bodies which have no sufficient resources to organize various sport activities, is to delegate these to their sport clubs and to involve volunteers. According to these pathways, we propose a performance management tool to help sport governing bodies to reach their missions. Our research shows that combinations of factors are useful to understand and to « explain » high performance.