Ethical leadership of artistic gymnastics coaches and its relation to job satisfaction

Ethical leadership in sport has been investigated from various perspectives such as coaches’, volunteers’, sport administrators’ and sport fans’ perspectives. During the last decades, it has begun to claim much of the scientific attention, due to the existence of scandals in sports that receive a lot of publicity from the mass media. The aim of this study was to investigate the perspective of artistic gymnastics coaches on ethical leadership. Coaches' job satisfaction and its relationship to ethical leadership was also explored. The sample consisted of 34 Greek artistic gymnastics coaches who coached in sport clubs of Thessaloniki, Greece. The self-reported questionnaire of ethical leadership (QueL) was used to assess coaches’ ethical leadership. It consists of 27 items distributed to two factors: “telos” which represents the ethical goal of a leader's behavior (16 items) and “ethos” which reflects the ethical principles underlying the leader's personal attitudes and characteristics (11 items). The answers were given in a 6 points Likert scale format (1=It does not characterize at all to 6=It totally characterizes me). The short form of Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) was used to assess Coaches’ job satisfaction, that consists of 20 items, 12 of which belong to “intrinsic job satisfaction” (feelings regarding the inherent characteristics of the job) and eight of them belong to “extrinsic job satisfaction” (feelings about aspects external to the actual work). The answers were given in a 5 points Likert scale format (1=totally disagree to 5=totally agree. The questionnaires showed satisfactory internal consistency with values over .70 (Cronbach, 1951). Results showed that "telos" and "ethos" were highly correlated with "extrinsic job satisfaction".  A low, but significant correlation was noticed between “telos” and coaches’ age. The findings of the study are discussed in a “closed circuit” approach of sport clubs, that include all stakeholders and have the possibility to create and cultivate ethical behaviors. This study’s significance lies in the fact that ethical leadership forms the cornerstone for ensuring a sustainable and healthy sport organization, such as an artistic gymnastics club, which in turn contributes to sports’ moral influence upon individuals and society. Proposals for future research are also given.