Virtuousness in Sports Organizations : Examination of Ethical Organizational Culture and Its Virtues

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ethical organizational culture of top sports organizations in Finland. We were especially interested in how employees of sports organizations evaluate perceptions of ethical organizational culture and perceive specific ethical organizational virtues. We applied a mixed methods approach. We gathered the empirical material through questionnaires and interviews with representatives from Finland’s top sports organizations. The findings show that the questionnaire participants evaluated the perceptions of ethical organizational culture of the Finnish top sports organizations as being quite ethical. The findings also show that the ethical organizational virtues of transparency, discussability, congruency of management, and supportability have a special role in maintaining and developing but also challenging organizational ethics in sports organizations. This study contributes to the discussion on ethical organizational virtues and deepens the understanding of the virtuousness of organizations in the field of sports management research.