A stakeholder perspective on ethical leadership in sport: Bridging the gap between the normative and descriptive lines of inquiry

Abstract

This critical PhD review paper examines existing scholarship on ethical leadership in sport. Following a general trend in business ethics and related fields, ethical leadership has gained considerable research attention in sport over the last decades. Within this growing body of literature, ethical leadership is often presented as part of the desired strategic response of sport organizations to tackle the so-called dark side of sport (i.e., formed by such ethical issues as abuse, violence, management fraud, match-fixing, and doping). However, this critical PhD review paper argues that the current body of literature on ethical leadership in sport has matured along two strongly related yet quite isolated lines of inquiry: a normative (i.e., philosophical) and a descriptive (i.e., empirical) line. While the normative line of inquiry focuses on what ethical leadership in sport should look like based on moral reasoning, the descriptive line examines how ethical leadership in sport is perceived in practice and how it relates to certain antecedents and outcomes. As both lines offer complementary insights, we advocate future research to bridge this gap to come to an improved understanding of ethical leadership in sport. To this aim, we propose a broad stakeholder perspective on ethical leadership in sport, in which necessary attention is given to how all involved stakeholders make sense of ethical leadership as a socially constructed and context-dependent phenomenon.