Unit 7 Final Assignment Paper and Powerpoint

Ethical and strategic sports leadership is a very critical tool in the fights against the athletes’ use of PEDs. Strategic leadership is a three-step process that includes the strategy formulation, implementation, and evaluation (Wahlström, 2018). Through ethical leadership, strategic leaders can effectively and significantly prevent or influence athletes from using PEDs like anabolics and other steroids, dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), diuretics, blood doping, ephedrine, Human growth hormones (HGH), etc (Krans, 2016). Strategic leaders can successfully help fights PEDs within the sports industry by exercising their abilities to create ethical and desirable vision, express it, passionately possess it, and persistently pursue it to its fulfillment. Strategic leaders express strategic vision for their teams and organizations and persuade and motivate them to pursue the vision until its accomplishment. Generally, the modern sport industry is under constant scrutiny for moral bankruptcy (Ibrahim, 2017). Thus, strategic leaders, driven by the incessant need for success, are ethical leaders, and apply moral reasoning to approach and resolve value-based conflicts and ethical dilemmas that might arise within their sports organizations like the PEDs usage by athletes. Under such circumstances, ethical strategic leaders strive to choose well by pursuing options that would not only bring success to them and the organization, but also reduce risks like damage to their reputation.

Ethical strategic leadership is two-fold. It entails the leader making and following ethical decisions to resolve ethical dilemmas and exploring their deep personal beliefs and values concerning both self and sport, and which inform their thinking and action. Strategic leaders should prioritize value-based culture and ethical leadership at all times. The leaders need to serve as role models of respect, fairness, honesty, trustworthiness, and integrity to their teams. They also model on how the superstar professional athletes under them should use values like pursuit for honor, professionalism, and the spirit of sportsmanship to guide their decisions and actions, and that they should strive to enact reward systems that ensure that their team-members are accountable for ethical, legal and professional conduct throughout their career in sports. Strategic leaders are often at a better position to accomplish massive success in their endeavors because of their vision and general success that they enjoy within the organization, especially due to their success trend. Ethical strategic leaders often have the moral courage to follow what is morally right irrespective of the circumstances that they may find themselves (Lumpkin & Doty, 2014). Accordingly, they can help nurture the appropriate value-based culture that is against PEDs’ usage by athletes within their organizations.

References Ibrahim, L. Y. (2017, June). Leadership & Ethical Leadership In Sports Organizations: A Review. Leadership. Krans, B. (2016, December 19). Performance Enhancers: The Safe and the Deadly. (M. Charles, Editor) Retrieved November 10, 2020, from Healthline: https://www.healthline.com/health/performance-enhancers-safe-deadly Lumpkin, A., & Doty, J. (2014, August/ Fall). Ethical Leadership in Intercollegiate Athletics. The Journal of Values-Based Leadership, 7(2 - Article 6). Savulescu, J., Foddy, B., & Clayton, M. (2004). Performance Enhancing Drugs: Why We Should Allow Performance Enhancing Drugs In Sport. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 38(6), 666-670. Wahlström, T. (2018, November 1). Strategic Management in Sports. Retrieved November 10, 2020, from The Sport Digest: http://thesportdigest.com/2018/11/strategic-management-in-sports/