The
Meanings of Corporate Integrity
by
Sometimes integrity is simply
used as a substitute for the good or the right. Richard
DeGeorge uses the term in this way, “Acting
with integrity is the same as acting ethically
or morally.”2 There is certainly
something right about this definition; integrity
does have a normative meaning. In fact
it has several meanings, and each one can help
us understand its significance, not as a substitute
for ethics, but as a significant addition to
other ethical standards. To understand
these various meanings, we need to begin with
its original meaning, which comes from the notion
of “integral.” An integral
represents a whole.3 Wholeness, of
course, always implies the presence of parts,
so integrity requires not only wholeness, but
also the right relationships among the parts
of a whole. To create integrity, therefore,
is to integrate the parts into a whole. The
relationships between the parts and the whole
offer various meanings of integrity, including
integrity as consistency, as relational awareness,
as inclusion, and as pursing a worthwhile purpose.
Integrity
as consistency. Perhaps
the most common meaning of integrity is consistency. Integrity
here refers to the alignment between what one
does and what one says. Doing and saying
should belong to the same whole. This is
the way Charles Watson uses integrity in his
book Managing with Integrity:
There
is wholeness in what the person with integrity
says and does. There is consistency between
his actions and what he purports to honor. He
pursues his aims along the high road and is uninterrupted
and undiminished by temptations for quick or
easy personal gain. He seems undisturbed
by the opinions of others hold or express about
him and what he honors. His upright conduct
is made possible through steadfast adherence
to unbending principles and standards, and his
character is marked by an undaunted quest for
important ends far larger than his own needs,
comfort, and interests. 4
This understanding of personal
integrity is certainly praiseworthy in some cases. Taken
as the complete definition of integrity, however,
it leaves us with a potentially dangerous use
of the term. Imagine for a moment that
this person with integrity is a totally unconscious
individual, who is unaware of his privileges,
but believes that everyone has had similar opportunities
as he has had. Does his integrity here—being
undisturbed by the opinions of others and practicing
steadfast adherence to unbending principles and
standards—help or prevent him from becoming
conscious of his relationships with others in
larger social and economic systems? If
integrity means wholeness, and if a particular
consistency prevents one from an awareness of
one’s whole situation, then consistency
would actually prevent the creation of integrity. To
be fair to Watson, his book argues elsewhere
that managers have a “duty to think” and
to consider different points of view. 5 Still,
his description of managerial integrity expresses
a common attitude about the self: at its best
the self is isolated from others, true to its
own principles, and is a complete “whole.”
As most of us know from our
own experience, this notion of the isolated self
is less than a half-truth. We are born
to live in relationships with others. The
relational self exists prior to, and serves as
the foundation for, expressions of the individual
self. So integrity as wholeness must be
defined not only by consistency but also by relational
awareness.
Integrity as relational awareness. In a book on executive
integrity, Suresh Srivastva and Frank Barrett
write that: “The ‘wholeness’ that
the word integrity refers to is the wholeness
of the relationship, the wholeness of the interaction.” 6 Robert
Solomon also defines integrity as relational: “`Wholeness’ means
that one’s identity is not that of an
isolated atom but rather the product of a larger
social molecule, and that wholeness includes—rather
than excludes—other people and one’s
social role.”7 For individuals
to have real integrity, they must be conscious
of the relationships in which they live. Does
that mean that we should throw out the notion
of consistency? Not completely, because
the self has two quite different ways of beings.
In my business ethics classes,
I ask students to write out a description of
who they are. They usually write down specific
characteristics, such as honest, caring, hard
working, and so on. I take these to refer
to how they think they will respond or act in
specific circumstances. They can be understood
as virtues or dispositions to act in certain
ways rather than others.8 Sometimes
the students write out a very different set of
terms. They use such terms as sons, daughters,
students, parents, and so on. These are
all relational terms. Instead of identifying
dispositions toward action, like the first set
of terms, this set identifies persons in terms
of their involvements and memberships, as related
persons. Integrity applies to both aspects
of the self. As a relational self, integrity
requires a relational awareness, a consciousness
of the relations in which one participates.9 In
terms of human action, integrity requires consistency
in action; a consistency between what one says
and what one does. So both aspects of integrity
are necessary because the self is both relational
and an agent. This is also true of corporations. Corporate
designers also have to answer questions of identity
(the who-are-we question) and questions of action
(the what-should-we-do question). It is
only possible to fully understand the who-we-are
question when we act on the third meaning of
integrity: inclusion.
Integrity as inclusion. In groups and teams, inclusion
requires an openness of differences and disagreements. On
the organizational level, it can also refer
to listening to different voices, even disagreeable
ones. The idea of integrity as inclusion
has also been used to talk about including
ethics and compliance programs in everyday
business practices. Lynn Sharp Paine,
for example, has suggested that instead of
imposing compliance programs to constrain corporate
behavior, managers should integrate compliance
programs into their daily operations. In
this way, ethics becomes included in the business.10
Kaptein and Wempe have developed
a theory of corporate integrity that relies on
all three meanings of integrity reviewed so far:
integrity as consistency, as relational, and
as inclusion.11 The consistency
aspect of integrity refers to the union of words
and deeds. The relational aspect refers to the
multiple relationships with various stakeholders.
The inclusion meaning refers to the integration
of the ethical theories of virtue ethics, deontology
and utilitarianism in guiding corporate decisions. When
they put these three meanings of integrity together,
they see corporate integrity as balancing the
different claims and obligations that arise from
both inside and outside the corporation.
The balancing metaphor certainly
expresses the process of trying to include different
interests and ethical standards, but it does
not indicate the reason for the balancing act. In
other words, what is the corporation pursing
that gives its whole process integrity? Kaptein
and Wempe’s answer is that people create
businesses to be more efficient than they could
be alone.[xii] Efficiency, however, is
not the kind of purpose that elicits integrity. Drug
dealers may be efficient, but that does not mean
they should be praised for having integrity.
What is missing in Kaptein and Wempe theory is
the notion of a good corporate purpose. A complete
understanding of integrity must include this
fourth meaning—integrity as pursuing a
worthwhile purpose.
Integrity as pursuing a worthwhile
purpose. When we say that someone
or something has integrity, it is a way of
praising them. Integrity, in other words,
is a virtue, not a vice. To use integrity
only as a means of integrating ethical principles
into business practices, or even as a balancing
of different claims, largely overlooks that
integrity itself is an ethical principle. Integrity,
in other words, has a normative connotation
that provides a guideline for right action.
The goodness implicit in the
notion of integrity comes from its place in the
larger language system to which it belongs. In
this system, it has a positive meaning. We
don’t blame people for having integrity. We
praise them. And we praise them not only because
they are consistent, aware of relationships,
and able to include different theories and claims,
but also because they are pursuing something
that is worthwhile.
These various meanings of integrity
are not really opposed to each other, but rather
together give us a strong notion of what integrity
means. When organizational structures encourage
openness to differences and disagreement, treat
people consistently, enter into dialogue with
others about complicated issues, and pursue a
worthwhile purpose, then we can have some assurance
that they deserve to be praised for having integrity.
——————————————————————
1 “The Four
Meanings of Integrity” is taken from Marvin
T. Brown Corporate Integrity:
Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership (Cambridge University Press,
2005) available in March 2005.
2 Richard T. DeGeorge
Competing with Integrity
in International Business (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993),
p.5.
3 The
American heritage Dictionary of The English
Language, Third Edition
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992) p. 937
4 Charles E. Watson
Managing with Integrity:
Insights from America’s
CEOs (New York: Praeger, 1991), p. 171
5 Ibid. p. 57.
6 Suresh Srivastva
and Frank J. Barrett “Foundations for Executive
Integrity: Dialogue, Diversity, Development “ in
Suresh Srivastva and Associates, Executive
Integrity: The search for High Human Values in
Organizational Life (San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass, 1989),
p. 291
7 Robert C. Solomon,
A Better Way to Think About
Business: How Personal Integrity Leads to Corporate
Success (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 40.
8 I take this to
be Aristotle’s understanding of the virtues. They
were dispositions or habitual ways of responding
to situations. The virtues, in other words,
are related to actions.
9 A similar notion
of the individual-in-relationships or in-community
can be found in several business ethics books,
such as Michael Rion The
Responsible Manager: Practical Strategies for
Ethical Decision Making (Amherst, Mass.: Human Resource Development Press,
1996), as well as the writings of Robert Solomon
Ethics and Excellence, and Edwin Hartman, Organizational
Ethics and The Good Life (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996).
10 Lynn Sharp Paine, “Managing
for Organizational Integrity” Harvard
Business Review, (March/April, 1994), p. 106-117. Other
authors also have used corporate integrity as
an integration of ethical theory or as an integration
of ethics and corporate practices. See
Debbie Thorne LeClair, O. C. Ferrell, John P.
Fraedrich, Integrity Management:
A Guide to Managing Legal and Ethical Issues
in the Workplace (Tampa,
Florida: University of Tampa Press, 1998, and
Joseph A. Petrick and John F. Quinn’s Management
Ethics: Integrity at Work (Thousand Oaks: Sage,
1997)
11 Muel Kaptein and
Johan Wempe The Balanced
Company: A Theory of Corporate Integrity (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002).
12 Ibid. p. 165.