Do your organisation’s employees feel that they can act with integrity?
How to ensure employees are acting ethically is a question that keeps leaders awake at night. Very often, the answers they come up with involve, in some way or other, motivating employees to do the right thing by appealing to self-interest. The assumption behind, for example, linking financial rewards to good behaviour, or broadening out disciplinary processes in the hope of catching more examples of unethical conduct, is that, ultimately, employees respond most readily when their own interests are at stake. In this article, I will argue that this approach leaves important gaps, and that the most effective way of filling these gaps is by creating a culture which promotes and enables integrity.
Nobody wants the next corporate scandal to happen on their watch. It is especially worrying when you consider that so many of these scandals happen in organisations that apparently pride themselves on their sound values and right way of doing things. For example, shortly before it collapsed in an explosion of ‘recklessness, hubris and greed’, the UK public sector construction giant Carillion was producing reports extolling the solid foundation afforded by its values, which apparently shaped ‘the way we do business, how we work with each other, our customers, our suppliers, our partners and all those with whom we interact when delivering our services’, were ‘at the heart of everything we do’ and drove ‘our commitment to delivering safe, sustainable and effective solutions for our customers, and creating positive legacies wherever we work’.
Perhaps Carillion’s leaders were aware on some level that their actual business practices were not living up to these glowing descriptions. But leaders sometimes seem to be blindsided when decisions that they apparently thought were perfectly fine are seen as unethical by their customers and the wider public. For example, the way Wetherspoons’ Chairman, Tim Martin, reacted back in March to the government’s introduction of lockdown measures — by describing these measures as a ‘tactical error’ and stopping his employees’ wages — was seen by many as prioritising profits over both public safety and its duty of care to its employees. This happened in a way that seemed to take Martin by surprise.
But perhaps the most concerning question for organisational leaders is this: even if you think you are getting things right yourself, and your organisation’s values are a sincere expression of how you think the business is working, how can you be confident that employees throughout the organisation do not have disastrous ethical blind-spots? When the practices involved in payment protection insurance (PPI) mis-selling were exposed, they seemed obviously unacceptable in retrospect, but they had carried on for years, unquestioned by managers and sustained by a corporate culture that saw such practices as ‘just business’.
Answers to these questions have filled the pages of academic business ethics journals and popular management books alike. Many of these answers have taken a similar form: in one way or another, what you should do is to seek to align your employees’ self-interest with what you see as ethical behaviour. Essentially, you reward employees who do the right thing, and punish those who do not.
This is a perfectly understandable response to some of these scandals. In the case of PPI for example, it seems clear that one big contributing factor was the way those involved — whether the individual operatives selling the products or their managers — were rewarded. These rewards gave them an incentive to close as many sales as possible, and not to ask too many questions about whether those sales actually served the interests of the customers who were buying. Remove these incentives, or at least counter-balance them with a reminder of ethical requirements, and consequences for those who breach those requirements, and perhaps you will solve the problem.
These responses are no doubt effective, at least to some extent. On the other hand, businesses have been trying to ensure ethical conduct by rewarding good behaviour and punishing bad for some time now, and the flow of corporate scandals has not stopped. I think there are three main limitations with this type of approach. Firstly, you will never eliminate every situation in which an unscrupulous or weak-willed employee can get away with acting unethically, and indeed when it is in their interest to do so. Secondly, the closer you get to achieving this goal, the more you stifle the autonomy of employees, putting them under near-constant surveillance and allowing them to act only within very narrow parameters. This is not good for an organisation’s responsiveness to change or its ability to innovate. Finally, it limits employees’ ability to make and act on their own ethical judgment, which can make them less effective at meeting ethical challenges, not more. It says to employees, ‘follow the rules and you will be okay — no need to think deeply about the ethics of your job.’ But this is a false promise, because no set of rules can give explicit, unambiguous guidance on what to do in any situation.
Integrity, I believe, is the quality that is needed to fill these gaps. People with integrity do the right thing even when no-one is looking, and they do so reliably, without the need to curb their autonomy. They have an internalised set of moral commitments which they are able to apply with care and diligence to a wide range of situations, including those that they have never encountered before. But promoting integrity in an organisation requires taking a different approach, and thinking beyond simple incentives.
In this article, I will give a very brief overview of the results of a large-scale, academically rigorous research project which we at the Inter-Disciplinary Applied (IDEA) Centre at the University of Leeds carried out — the Real Integrity project — which sought to understand what integrity is, and how organisations can get it. On the basis of around 1,500 completed surveys, and 94 hour-long interviews with employees of 15 organisations, from the very small to the very large, in a range of industries and sectors, we developed a set of insights into corporate culture which now form the basis of our work with organisations.
But before we can understand how to promote integrity in organisations, we first need to understand what we are trying to promote.
What is integrity?
Integrity has something to do with wholeness. The root of the word is in the Latin integer, the same root from which we get words like entire and integration. People with integrity have a wholeness of character: they act consistently, and can be relied on to do as they say they will. But is this all there is to integrity? If so, someone who cheated, exploited or even murdered other people would count as having integrity, as long as they did so consistently and openly. What’s more, as the philosopher Lynn McFall has pointed out,[1] if someone like this took a short break from cheating, exploiting and murdering, and instead cared for or helped someone, this would count as a failure of integrity, which seems odd. Still, defenders of the consistency view might be willing to accept this consequence; in that case, integrity becomes something that is only valuable — that we should only care about someone having — if the person with integrity is also morally praiseworthy in other ways. Indeed, if someone is not morally praiseworthy, it might be better for other people if they didn’t have integrity. There is no value in being consistently evil.
For McFall, merely consistent action is not enough to say that someone has integrity; the person also needs to act on the basis of deeply held moral commitments. And the depth of these commitments comes from the role they have in forming part of our identity. They are the commitments which, if we were to fall short of them, would call into question our very sense of who we are as people. Imagine you were to find yourself betraying a close friend, for example. At that point you might feel not only guilty, but as if you no longer had the right to think of yourself as being the same person. You would have lost your sense of self, and it might be very difficult to rebuild that sense.
To put this in a work context, you might find yourself in a position where the organisation you work for no longer appears to live up to the image you had of it. For many if not most of us, there needs to be some degree of congruence between our personal moral commitments and the activities of the organisation we work for. This need not entail that the organisation needs to be on some crusading moral mission, but that it should at least be providing a useful service, and doing so without exploiting people, or causing harm. If something happened to call that into question — you found out something about the way the organisation treated its suppliers, say, or that it was deceiving its customers. Perhaps you thought the organisation’s leaders cared about the wellbeing of its employees, but the way they acted in a time of crisis (a global pandemic, say) revealed that they saw them essentially as a means to the delivery of the organisation’s aims, and not as having value in their own right. In that case, you might question whether the organisation is really what you thought it was. But you might also wonder about your own place in that organisation, and whether it is consistent with your own sense of who you are. What should you do then? One answer would be to leave. This would enable you to keep your own hands clean and, perhaps, to feel more morally comfortable. But it would not help anybody who might be being harmed by the organisation’s actions. In which case, you might come to the conclusion that integrity requires you instead to stay and try to change things.
This illustrates a point of tension in the way we think about integrity. If integrity is about maintaining internal wholeness and consistency, then avoiding morally difficult situations, or indeed any kind of conflict, allows you to do that. But is that really integrity? A big part of what we find valuable about people with integrity is not that they keep their own hands clean, but that they also represent their values in a community of people who might not share those values, or be acting consistently in line with them, and by doing this they are able to have an influence. This aspect of integrity — captured in the idea of standing for something — has been highlighted by the philosopher Cheshire Calhoun.[2]
Promoting integrity in organisations
Thinking about integrity in these ways, it might be starting to sound like something which organisations cannot do much about. You either have it or you do not: all organisations can do is try to recruit people with integrity and identify, discipline and perhaps ultimately eject people who do not. But this is to underestimate the effect of culture on the extent to which people can manifest and act on integrity. On the TV comedy-drama Succession last year, there was an exchange between two characters in which one character dared to timidly suggest that maybe a news organisation shouldn’t lie to its viewers. This tentative expression of a principle was met with horror: ‘This is not [expletive removed] Charles Dickens world, okay? You don’t go around talking about principles. We’re all trying to do the right thing. Of course we are. But come on!’ Logan Roy’s evil media empire might be a comically extreme portrayal of an organisation with an unethical culture, but the fact is that some organisations resemble it more than others. If employees do not feel able to discuss concrete ethical issues without being seen as awkward or ‘not a team player’, then all but the most determined will be put off from speaking out.
Employee Voice
When we interviewed and surveyed people for our research, those who praised the integrity of their organisation consistently talked about the openness of its culture — that its leaders genuinely want to hear employees’ views, even when those views might be uncomfortable to hear. Achieving this kind of open culture requires proactive measures. In one organisation we spoke to, the Chief Executive made himself available at weekly informal breakfast meetings where employees from throughout the organisation were randomly selected to attend. The informality of the meetings meant employees genuinely felt they could talk freely, and the Chief Executive had an excellent sense of the mood throughout the business. This was in stark contrast to another organisation in which employees’ chief means of raising concerns was in a monthly Chief Executive’s briefing with the whole organisation — about 250 people — present. The meetings always ended with a request for anyone to raise any issues they wanted to discuss… followed by silence. Of course, there may be issues which are too serious or sensitive to be discussed openly, and open culture needs to be supplemented by sources of advice and reporting channels which are easy to access and genuinely confidential. But if employees feel they cannot raise ethical issues without invoking formal processes to do so, many such issues will be missed.
Tone from the Top
These examples also illustrate another of our key findings: that the organisation’s leaders set the tone for the organisation, by exemplifying integrity in their own behaviour. When asked about the integrity of their organisation, more often than anything else, it was to the behaviour of leaders — good or bad — that interviewees’ minds turned. Unsurprisingly, unethical leaders can spread cynicism through the organisation, as employees fail to see why they should uphold high ethical standards if leaders are not prepared to do the same. On the other hand, many of the positive stories we heard were not of leaders projecting an image of spotless perfection, but being willing to admit to mistakes and honest about the steps they were taking to rectify them.
Alignment of organisational procedures
We also looked at how various organisational functions, processes and procedures either contributed to or detracted from the organisation’s ability to promote and encourage integrity. Many of the good examples we found can be summarised as providing support for ethical decision-making. For employees to exercise integrity requires them to have a degree of autonomy, but also to have access to guidance and advice when they need it. We were also interested in how the organisation sought to manage incentives. Although an organisation cannot promote integrity by seeking to manipulate employees’ behaviour through incentives, it is important to think carefully about how the incentives that operate in the organisation do affect employees’ ability to have and act on integrity. Both rewards and disciplinary processes can have a detrimental effect on integrity if they are not seen to be fair and consistent.
There is no magic bullet that will allow an organisation suddenly to become the kind of place where integrity flourishes. Getting to grips with the often overlooked aspects of organisational culture that might be holding the organisation back from enabling its employees to act with integrity is a long-term — in fact, never-ending — process. It requires a willingness to genuinely listen to and act on the concerns of employees, to admit to mistakes, and to really examine the organisational and cultural barriers that hold people back from speaking up and creating an open culture. But the reward is an ethical resilience that cannot be achieved through incentives alone.
If you would like to talk about how your organisation can get better at promoting and encouraging integrity, contact Jim Baxter at j.d.baxter@leeds.ac.uk.
[1] McFall, Lynne (1987), ‘Integrity’, Ethics, Vol. 98, №1, Oct. 1987, 5–20.
[2] Calhoun, Cheshire (1995), ‘Standing for Something’, Journal of Philosophy XCII, №5, May 1995, 235–260.
