Prottas at Adelphi University found that employees’ perceptions of their manager’s behavioural integrity were “positively related to job satisfaction, job engagement, health, and life satisfaction.” Most people want to do a good job, and they'll be happier working for someone with integrity than for someone who asks them to compromise their own principles. So acting with integrity will allow you to reap the benefits from better relationships with the people you deal with. Similarly, a lack of integrity will scupper your reputation. If you act with integrity, people will trust you, and word will spread faster than any advertising campaign you could ever come up with. For employees, customers, business partners and everyone else you have contact with, trust is essential.
Investors need to trust you to put their money to good use and deliver a profitable, sustainable business. Suppliers need to trust you to pay them for the goods they deliver. In the business world, reputation is everything. This is backed up by research from Robert Half Management Resources, which found that both workers and CFOs (Chief Financial Officers) named integrity as the most important attribute in a corporate leader (it was cited by 75% of workers and 46% of CFOs).īut why exactly is integrity so important in business? Here are seven reasons. Leaders stand up for what they believe in.” Leaders know that honesty and integrity are the foundations of leadership. 7 Reasons Why Integrity Is Important in BusinessĪccording to motivational speaker and author Brian Tracy: "Whenever I hold a strategic planning session, the first value that all the executives agree on is integrity. You're whole.Īlthough acting with integrity is sometimes difficult and can lead to short-term fallout, it's got some important benefits, which we’ll look at next. You don’t present different faces or tell different stories to different people. When you act with integrity, you’re the same person in all scenarios, whether you’re talking to the boss or the janitor. Keep in mind, also, that the dictionary’s second meaning for “integrity” is “the state of being whole and undivided,” as in “territorial integrity.” That concept of wholeness, from the Latin root of “integer” that also gives us words like “integrate” and “entirety,” is important. That trade-off is a common theme of integrity in business, and we’ll come back to it later in this tutorial. In that example, acting without integrity would probably have led to a better short-term outcome but created problems further down the road. It comes down to honesty, which is why the right course of action in the earlier example was to tell the truth about the data breach rather than trying to cover it up. The key to acting with integrity is to understand what your personal values are and then to be true to those values. As we saw in our article on ethical leadership, people can have different value systems and beliefs. It’s important to note that these moral principles are undefined and vary from person to person.
Oxford Dictionaries defines integrity as: “The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.” Let’s start with a definition of integrity, especially as applied to the business world.
You’ll also learn seven reasons why integrity is important in business, and you’ll get some tips on how to act with integrity in difficult business situations. So, in this tutorial we’ll try to bring some clarity to the subject by examining the meaning of integrity in detail with examples of integrity (and lack of integrity) in action. Whether you run a business or work for someone else, you’ll often run into situations in which it’s very difficult to act with integrity or you’re not even sure what the right course is. In this example, the right thing to do is quite clear-cut, but that’s not always the case. People trusted you with their personal data, after all, so you've got a responsibility to tell them if there’s even a small chance that it was compromised. So wouldn’t it be OK just to keep quiet about it, at least for now?Īs tempting as it would be to put a lid on the bad news, acting with integrity means being honest about what happened and dealing with the fallout. Besides, you’re pretty sure that no sensitive data actually got into the hackers’ hands. Publicising the incident will ruin your launch and scare off your customers and investors. Just before a major product launch, your head of IT tells you there’s been a minor breach of systems containing customer data. If you act with integrity, people will trust you. If you want to understand the meaning of integrity in business, consider the following scenario.