British Journal of Management, Vol. 31, 24–41 (2020) DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12345 An Olympic-sized Challenge: Efect of Organizational Pathology on Maintaining and Repairing Organizational Legitimacy in Sports Governing Bodies Stephanos Anastasiadis and Laura J. Spence School of Management, Royal Holloway, University ofLondon, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, UK Corresponding author email: stephanos.anastasiadis@royalholloway.ac.uk Private organizations increasingly wield public authority, with substantial impact on the lives of individual persons. Such authority is often paired with enhanced public scrutiny and decreased trust in the relevant organization, leading to a loss of legitimacy. This paper uses sports governing bodies to contribute to the literature on governance by developing theory on the interaction between organizational legitimacy and pathological internal structures. It takes a nuanced view of legitimacy and extends a model of organizational pathology. While primarily conceptual, the paper uses the well-documented cases of the International Olympic Committee and, to a lesser extent, FIFA to illustrate how orga- nizational pathology can not only undermine an organization’s legitimacy, but can also interfere with its ability to perceive a path to legitimacy repair, even when it recognizes the necessity of doing so. The paper concludes with recommendations for practice and suggestions for future research looking beyond sports governing bodies. Introduction A corollary of the well-documented rise in power of private actors in contemporary societies is a corresponding fall in the power of governments (Albareda, 2008; Moon, Crane and Matten, 2011): the public–private distinction is arguably becom- ing ‘blurred’, as private organizations now afect public policy in various ways (Scherer, Palazzo and Matten, 2009, p. 331). Consequently, pri- vate organizations are coming under increasing moral scrutiny (Van Prooijen and Ellemers, 2015). Sports governing bodies (SGBs), such as the In- ternational Olympic Committee (IOC), the Inter- national Football Federation (FIFA) or the In- ternational Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) (Flyvbjerg, Stewart and Budzier, 2016), have an impact on citizens, particularly through their mega-events. They, too, face public scrutiny (e.g. Abend, 2014; amaBhungane, 2015; BBC, 2016, 2017), though the focus on individual lead- ers by the media sometimes obscures the organiza- tional perspectives on which we are focused here, and which provide the context for those sometimes corrupt leaders to flourish. As Rowe (2017, p. 515) argues, although entertaining, the focus on indi- viduals such as Joseph Blatter (of FIFA) covers up a failure to ‘to deal seriously with the institu- tional politics of sport’. This paper is determinedly organizational in perspective, and deals with the organizational challenges sporting organizations face in maintaining and (particularly) repairing legitimacy. The paper has two theoretical foundations. First, it introduces and expands Barnett and Finnemore’s (1999) model of organizational pathology to build a picture of the ongoing chal- lenges that some international sport organizations are facing. Our second theoretical foundation is Suchman’s (1995) seminal model of organizational C  2019 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.