Managing For Organizational Integrity By Lynn Paine

Managing for Organizational Integrity: By Lynn Sharp Paine

Lynn Paine, a Harvard Business School professor, explains how having an effective ethical managing system can improve competitiveness, create positive workforce moral, and help build strong relationships with all of the company's stakeholders. She believes that implementing an "integrity-based approach to ethics management" that "creates a climate that encourages exemplary conduct" is the best way "to discourage damaging misconduct." Paine's article tells the reader how most managers believe that it is not the organizations or managements responsibility when one "rogue employee" engages in actions that are unethical. She says feels that it is their business because "managers who fail to provide proper leadership and institute
The text defines organizational integrity as being "based on the concept of self-governance in accordance with a set of guiding principles. From the perspective of integrity, the task of ethics management is to define and give life to an organization's guiding values to create an environment that supports ethically sound behavior, and to instill a sense of shared accountability among employees." Some of the characteristics of such a strategy ensure that guiding values and commitments make sense and are clearly communicated, that company leaders are personally committed to take action on those values, that the values are integrated into all aspects of management decisions and activities, that the company's structure supports and reinforces those set values, and that all managers are knowledgeable and competent enough to make ethically sound decisions. There are different approaches to achieving organizational integrity as Paine exhibits from the examples of Martin Marietta, NovaCare, and Wetherill