Scoping review to identify key concepts for building sports organizational integrity

Abstract

Integrity has gained increasing attention in sports recently. Integrity in sports is often associated with issues such as doping, harassment, violence, betting, match-fixing, corruption, ethical deviance, and lack of governance. Currently, protecting and strengthening integrity involves two approaches: (1) attempting to maintain integrity by establishing rules and ensuring people comply with them (the rules approach), and (2) seeking to maintain integrity by looking to the future and aiming to avoid negative evaluation (the means approach). However, we hypothesize that adopting an approach that attempts to maintain the integrity by drawing out the altruistic and socially respectful traits inherent in people is also possible, and we set out to build a system to address this as an organization through a holistic approach. In this study, we aim to identify the relevant concepts that are important in building a mechanism to enhance integrity as an organization through a scoping review conducted using a standardized protocol in PRISMA-ScR. The research design was a scoping review, and the procedure followed the PRISMA-ScR to select and eligibility the articles. The central concepts of the eligibility articles were then extracted. Results of scoping review, we identified 63 review articles, excluded 7 articles because of duplication, and selected 56 articles. The first eligibility criterion for inclusion was that the research must be related to sports integrity, which resulted in the selection of 33 articles. The second eligibility criterion was organizational research, leading to the selection of 10 papers based on their eligibility. The 7 central keywords in the 10 selected papers were: gender, accountability, stakeholders, governance, coaching, leadership, and organizational performance. Some of the concepts, such as gender, accountability, and stakeholders, were not commonly found in previous sports integrity research, suggesting new perspectives on how to build a system to strengthen integrity in an organization.

Keywords: Sports integrity, leadership, coaching, governance, holistic approach

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1003739