Effect of managers’ strategic intelligence on the organizational performance of the national olympic committee with the mediating role of sustainable competitive advantage

In the current era of the sports industry, organizational performance is critical for success in a competitive environment. In the current dynamic situation, it is appropriate for organizations to focus their management expertise on finding effective ways to create a sustainable competitive advantage. Therefore, the Iranian National Olympic Committee is facing various management challenges in order to achieve optimal performance. The purpose of this research work is to determine the impact of managers' strategic intelligence on the organizational performance of the Iranian National Olympic Committee with a mediating role of sustainable competitive advantage. The current research work is applied research in terms of purpose, descriptive-correlation in terms of nature and content, and field data collection in terms of data collection. The statistical population of the research work was made up of managers, experts, and members of the general assembly of the National Olympic Committee of Iran. Also the sample size was determined in full. Therefore, 90 questionnaires were completed and analyzed. In order to collect information, three questionnaires of Maccoby's strategic intelligence (2004) and Kaplan and Norton's (2001) organizational performance were used, along with the sustainable competitive advantage questionnaire in Yu et al.'s (2017) research work. The content and form validity of the questionnaires were confirmed by asking the opinions of 7 sports management professors, and its reliability was also confirmed using the Cronbach's alpha test. In order to examine and analyze the data, descriptive and inferential statistics were used with the structural equation modeling approach; the data was analyzed using the partial least squares method. The research results showed the direct and positive impact of strategic intelligence on organizational performance and sustainable competitive advantage, as well as the direct and positive impact of sustainable competitive advantage on organizational performance. In addition, the mediating role of sustainable competitive advantage in the influence of managers' strategic intelligence on organizational performance was confirmed. Therefore, the managers and decision-makers of the Iranian National Olympic Committee can use the capacity of strategic intelligence and its dimensions at the group level to provide the basis for maintaining competitive advantage in order to increase organizational performance.