The Particularities of Ethics in the Management of Sports Organizations

The management of sports organizations is becoming an area that increasingly captures the attention of specialists and business community members. The particularities of sports activities marked by the need to promote ethical principles also leave their mark on the management of organizations by exercising various functions, from planning to the administration of sports events. The idea of our research is based on two controversial events held in international tennis in 2023, namely, the dilemma regarding how Novak Djokovic won the Australian Open for the tenth time and the punishment received by Simona Halep in the doping case detected on August 29, 2022 at the US Open. Using the Administrative Ethical Behavior Scale (AEBS), we analyzed how 235 athletes perceive and integrate ethical principles in their sporting activity. The research results demonstrate that good human relations and humanism are strongly influenced by the way athletes perceive their rights and freedoms but are not influenced by justice and equality. The respondents consider ethical principles a primary element of their sports activity. At the same time, good human relations and humanism, along with rights and freedoms, are particularities of ethics dictated by athletes’ subjective nature and not by external rules. The originality of our research consists in evaluating the ethical behavior of athletes both through a subjective approach and through a pragmatic approach by analogy with events that have raised ethical dilemmas in the sports world.