Organizational Integrity
A virtue-ethics framework that creates the foundation for performance, trust and ethical behavior in organizations.
The Pitch: a simple idea with a powerful impact
Traditional performance management creates sub-optimisation and fosters unethical behaviour.
Integrity-based management avoids this by anchoring performance in promises to stakeholders thereby aligning individual to organizational goals through the application of virtues and ethics.
Instead of employees chasing personal KPIs that may harm the bigger picture, they focus on keeping and honoring promises aligned with the organization’s purpose.
When words and actions align across all levels of an organization, performance improves, trust grows, and ethical behavior becomes natural.
The problem it solves
The usual approach
- Performance management often reduces to KPI chasing.
- This leads to sub-optimisation, silo behaviour, short-termism, and even unethical choices.
- Compliance systems treat ethics as rules to follow rather than virtues to live.
- This lead to the need of “lines of defence” and related functions that do not add value.
The Integrity Approach
- Anchors performance in promises to stakeholders.
- Creates transparency throughout the structure.
- Prevents suboptimisation by aligning purpose, goals, and actions based on ethics.
- Prevents conflicts of interests by solving contradictions on organizational level
- Makes ethical behavior intrinsic instead of externally enforced.
- Stimulates learning from mistakes and giving feedback on all levels
The Core Framework
a short introduction
The framework consists of the virtue-ethics concept of Integrity, which can then be applied on multiple levels of an organization.
Virtue-ethics concept of Integrity
At the center lies Integrity: consistency between promises and actions.
This is enabled by three supporting virtues:
- Courage (acting despite risks),
- Authenticity (being true to one’s values),
- Ethical Behavior (Consisting of fairness, truthfulness, trustworthiness, and compassion).
Ethical Behavior is uniquely supported by the Ethical Framework, which defines how values are interpreted.
- Character, the overarching virtue that binds everything together and ensures consistency across time and situations.
Levels of application
The top level is the abstract organization, the legal entity, which has a telos, a reason for existing.
The second level are the people who legally may speak or act on behalf of the abstract organization – make promises and must create the physical organsation to honor them and work towards the telos.
The third level consists of organizational structure entities: managers, functional responsibles, self-steering teams. These break down promises to constituent parts and create processes.
The fourth level are all members of the organization (including those on the second and third level). They do the actual work in achieving the promises of the organization.
The fifth level are those same individuals, but then as sentient beings that have a life outside of the organization, and subscribe to different ethical frameworks.
Coming soon:
Want to get started?
Implementing the framework in your organization.