What constitutes editorial virtuous leadership

Abstract

The International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology (IJSEP) has reached a milestone – its 20th anniversary. Reflecting on the past two decades of scholarship found within the IJSEP, we take exceptional pride in being named among the editors who came before us. One of us, Athanasios, is soon to complete his tenure with the IJSEP, while Robert has served as coeditor and editorial partner with Athanasios, since 2016. During our eight years of collaboration, we have co-authored several editorials and commentaries relating to pressing topics such as sport psychology research in emerging countries (Schinke et al., 2016) as we sought to advocate for inclusion and diversity, and navigating physical activity in a socially distanced world during covid (Papaioannou et al., 2020), given the perils we all experienced in terms of mental health when we found ourselves in social bubbles, isolated from peers, friends, and family. More recently, we have invited experienced guest authors we know to be leaders in the field to share their perspectives on diverse topics, found within our 2023 instalments. Scholars including Stuart Biddle, Dan Gould, Diane Gill, Liwei Zhang, and Markus Raab generously agreed to be part of the IJSEP anniversary years, and we are grateful for their efforts and friendship. These named initiatives are mere suggestion of a thriving academic journal, seeking to be at the crest of sport, exercise, and performance psychology science to practice. Within the current moment, we have also opted to consider, from a reflective vantage as authors, mentors, and as editors, what we believe should be the professional approach to editorship within the IJSEP. We believe, and hold firm, that editorial leadership within the academic realm should always strive toward a standard of excellence and professionalism in what they (including these authors) do and how editors should accord themselves with scholars and readership. According to ancient philosophers such as Aristotle and Confucius and modern philosophers (e.g., Anscombe, 1958; MacIntyre, 2007), psychologists (e.g., Fowers, 2012), and philosophers of education (e.g., Kristjánsson, 2007), excellence is, and must be, synonymous with virtue. There is no doubt that virtuous leadership is what all scientists expect as knowledge seekers, or at least they hope for, from their peer-review journal editors, as reasonable behaviour. Every editor will be regarded at a given moment as falling short in our attempts at virtue, but try, we must, with humility and sincerity. With the present editorial we do not want to implicitly or explicitly imply that our editorial leadership has been more or less virtuous than editors in any other journal within our field and among our allied professions. Instead, we undertook this task of reflecting upon virtuous editorship by tapping into our experience through, perhaps, a thirty-thousand-foot vantage, to inform our society, the International Society of Sport Psychology, of what we believe must be the guiding light and vision shared with the next generations of editors and editorial board members should this journal seek to advance and strive for ever-higher standards. Our gaze must turn toward an approach that includes, but also extends beyond striving for ever higher numeric indicators, such as our rapid progress in terms of submission rates, citations, readership, and altimetric scores. Howwe do our business must be at the very core of our reputation; for it speaks to who we are and why we are making such earnest attempts. In short, this journal’s leadership must be values-driven, with our gaze toward virtuous conduct. Searching for virtues across cultures, and based on the legacy of Aristotle and Confucius, Hackett and Wang (2012) identified five cardinal virtues among leaders, described as universal