Trust within sport NGB boards: association with board structure and board member characteristics

ABSTRACT

Research question: Trust is a critical element within organisational and management literature. It reflects the decisions and behaviour of individual actors and the functioning of organisations and their management bodies. However, within the sport governance literature there is a notable absence of work focusing on trust. This study examines the association of trust and structural features within national governing bodies’ (NGBs) boards.

Research methods: 242 board members of 65 NGBs from Germany participated in an online survey which comprised questions on trust indicators and boards’ structural features. Probit models were employed to analyse the association between trust indicators, individual board membership characteristics, and the boards' structural features.

Results and findings: Results suggest that trust is a multifaceted phenomenon, affected by various (beneficial and detrimental) variables in the specific context of NGB boards. The study makes numerous interrelation and governance dynamics recognisable, with board size, board members’ skill differentiation and temporal stability of boards appearing to be particularly relevant.

Implications: The paper complements the professionalisation literature and the leadership discussion in the context of sport governance, particularly with regard to trust-enhancing working conditions within boards. The study also aligns to the good governance literature, revealing that in some respects the issue may be seen to be about trade-offs between trust-based effects and their resultant (positive or negative) outcomes for organisation, board or individual.

KEYWORDS:

• Risk
• leadership
• cooperation
• monitoring
• sport organisation

Acknowledgements

A first version of this manuscript was presented at the 23rd Conference of the German Association of Sport Economics and Sport Management in Jena and at the 27th European Sport Management Conference in Seville. We would like to thank the conference participants for their valuable comments. Moreover, we are grateful to two anonymous referees for their thorough reviews and insightful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The questions about trust and about structural features were translated into German language. A re-translation into English showed no serious inconsistencies in terms of content. The items of the Short Scale of Interpersonal Trust were available in German and English.