Overview

If anyone doubts the importance of personal integrity one has only got to look at what happens to CEOs and organisational leaders once they are caught acting unethically or telling lies or behaving in a manner that is below the standard that can be tolerated by everyone concerned. On the other hand organisations that are seen to have leaders with high personal integrity are those that are found to be doing extremely well at a competitive level. A team of researchers at London Business School have established that in cases where most employees believe that their leaders have personal integrity the performance of the organisations concerned tended to be extremely high. For instance Hewlett Packard was considered to have 80% approval of their staff vis-a-vie the personal integrity of their leaders. In 1992 for instance the turnover and profitability of HP has risen by 20% a year without any additional increase in work force. So in order to understand what integrity is all about it is however essential to distinguish it from other things. Some people use synonymously the word moral with integrity. Some others refer to integrity as standards or human beings moral compass. In a way personal integrity is also considered to be a woolly and blurred concept which is not qualified by the world of science or has not been appropriated to any discipline or field of study. It is about trying to understand the dynamics and the behaviour of human beings. In simplistic terms some people regard personal integrity as the balance between doing right and doing wrong. In some quarters personal integrity is regarded as the basic human instinct that guides individuals to conduct themselves in a manner that is acceptable to all. So the difference between integrity and morality, or ethics, or accountability for instance is as follows:1. Something which is moral is concerned with a judgement of goodness or badness as a result of human action or character. The word morality on the other hand means a code of conduct or a set of beliefs that distinguish right from wrong and very often there is an adverse reaction to people's behaviour when it is perceived that they have conducted themselves wrongly or there is applaud and recognition when people conduct themselves in a rightful way.2. The word ethics on the other hand is concerned with the nature of what is referred to as the ultimate value and the standards by which human actions can be judged as right or wrong. It is therefore conformance to a moral rule or a code that in particular businesses are expected to abide by. The code of ethics is a conduct that can be judged and evaluated by others.3. Accountability on the other hand means transparency in governance and it is about weighing the irresponsibility, answerability and the responsibility in terms of liability of businesses in particular.

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