Organizational Misbehavior

Integrity is important to me, so essential to my life that I decided to write my own prefatory comments rather than ask someone else. I was blessed with a mother and father of integrity in the sense of honesty and trustworthiness. Throughout childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, my understanding of integrity was limited to this selfsame sense of fair dealing with people. After taking my doctorate in economics at the University of Virginia, I began a career in academics, eventually a fifteen-year stint as a business school dean at three different universities. In 1971, I began a robust management consulting practice alongside my academic career. Consulting reshaped my understanding and sense of integrity. Working with companies to improve productivity, cost, and profit as well as to facilitate strategic planning, I became concerned about organizational integrity, actually appalled at lapses in organizational integrity that I observed. This concern led to more thinking about integrity itself. First, I realized that integrity comes from the same Latin root as integer, meaning a whole number. I then realized that integrity implies parts that must join, combine, and unite to make the whole. Next, I realized that organizational integrity joins, combines, and unites persons of integrity. In other words, organizational integrity is based on personal integrity. Finally, I realized that my understanding of integrity was too narrow, too limited. Honesty and trustworthiness are not integrity. The characteristics of honesty and trustworthiness are outward signs of integrity. When a person has integrity, he or she is honest and trustworthy.