Smart Governance and the Quality of Administrative Decision-Making in Sport Organizations: A Conceptual Approach Toward Institutional Excellence

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between smart governance and the quality of administrative decision-making in sport organizations, in a context where pressure for transparency and accountability intersects with the accelerating expansion of digitalization and data analytics. The study adopts a theoretical and analytical design based on a structured conceptual review of a selected body of literature, chosen according to explicit criteria of topical relevance, scholarly weight, and verifiability. The study concludes that smart governance is not a technological addition to traditional governance, but rather a restructuring of the decision-making architecture itself through four mechanisms: the digitalization of information flows, the institutionalization of evidence, the extension of accountability to algorithms, and the shortening of the feedback cycle. The study proposes a three-loop operational model in which smart governance is the independent variable, the quality of administrative decision-making is the mediating variable, and institutional excellence is the dependent variable, supported by a set of measurement indicators and a four-level maturity matrix. The study concludes that the effect of smart governance on institutional excellence is indirect and necessarily operates through decision quality, and that disregarding this mediation in applied research produces misleading estimates.