Integrity is one of the fundamental values that employers seek in the employees that they hire. It is the hallmark of a person who demonstrates sound moral and ethical principles at work.
A person who has integrity lives his or her values in relationships with coworkers, customers, and stakeholders. Honesty and trust are central to integrity. Acting with honor and truthfulness are also basic tenets in a person with integrity.
People who demonstrate integrity draw others to them because they are trustworthy and dependable. They are principled and can be counted on to behave in honorable ways even when no one is watching.
Examples of Integrity in Action
Integrity is another fundamental value that you recognize when you see it in the behavior of a coworker. But, it’s hard to describe adequately to provide a picture that produces shared meaning. So, the following are examples of integrity as it plays out every day in the workplace.
They were not blindsided by the CEO’s request that they all take a 10% pay cut so that the company could avoid layoffs or furloughs for the time being. The employees also felt confident in the turn-around plan they were following as they had helped develop it and they trusted their CEO.
John was a developer who had taken a path, that was not working out, to optimize the process the code was supposed to create. Rather than patching together a solution that was not optimum, but that would allow him to save his work, he went to his team. He explained the dead ends he had run into and that he thought that they could create problems for the continual development of advanced features for the software product in the future.
The team discussed and worked through the problem. John scrapped all of his code and started from scratch with the team’s input. His new solution allowed the team to be able to expand the product’s capabilities easily in the future.
Barbara went to the women’s restroom and used up the last bit of toilet...