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Integrity - Competency

Definition: Integrity is the unwavering commitment to core values, demonstrated through honesty, transparency, fairness, and ethical decision‑making that sets a standard others feel compelled to follow. It earns trust by keeping commitments, maintaining confidentiality, supporting and respecting others, and consistently behaving in principled ways--even in small matters or when consequences are difficult. It requires accountability and self‑regulation, including openly admitting mistakes, taking responsibility for outcomes, and ensuring actions align with stated values and organizational expectations. Integrity ultimately shows up through professionalism and leading by example, fostering strong interpersonal relationships and creating a culture where trust, excellence, and ethical conduct are the norm.
Personal Skills
Communication Skills
Flexibility
Adaptability
Creativity
Accountability
Action
Bias for Action
Commitment
Integrity
Excellence
Self Management
Passion To Learn
Continual Learning
Creativity
Professional Development
Feedback
Punctuality
Attitude
Cultural Awareness
Emotional Intelligence
360-Feedback Questionnaires Measuring Integrity:
Survey 1 (4-point scale; Competency Comments)
Survey 2 (4-point scale; Competency Comments)
Survey 3 (5-point scale; Competency Comments)
Survey 4 (5-point scale; radio buttons)
Survey 5 (4-point scale; words)
Survey 6 (4-point scale; words)
Survey 7 (5-point scale; competency comments; N/A)
Survey 8 (3-point scale; Agree/Disagree words; N/A)
Survey 9 (3-point scale; Strength/Development; N/A)
Survey 10 (Comment boxes only)
Survey 11 (Single rating per competency)
Survey 12 (Slide-bar scale)
Survey 13 (4-point scale; numbers; floating anchors)
Survey 14 (4-point scale; N/A)
Self-Comments: Do you have to complete a self-assessment or performance appraisal? If so, the
self-comments here may help.
Performance Management Assessments
that include Integrity
:
Assessment 1 (5-point scale; IDP Comments)
Assessment 2 (3-point scale with Comments)
Assessment 3 (Manager Assessment; 360-Feedback)
Assessment 4 (3-point scale; Rating Limits)
Assessment 5 (3-point scale; Rating Limits)
Assessment 6 (5-point scale with Comments)
Assessment 7 (Comment Boxes Only; IDP)
Assessment 8 (Comment Boxes Only)
Assessment 9 (3-point scale with Letter Grade)
Assessment 10 (360-Feedback; Bonus/Merit Pay)
Assessment 11 (Core Values & Job Competencies)
Assessment 12 (4-point scale; 6 Comment Boxes)
What is Integrity?
Integrity is the steadfast commitment to core values that guide behavior, decisions, and relationships, even when doing so is difficult or inconvenient. It is grounded in honesty, transparency, and ethical conduct--acting truthfully, communicating openly, and refusing to take shortcuts that compromise principles. People who embody integrity maintain confidentiality, uphold fairness, and consistently adhere to moral and organizational standards, creating a culture where integrity is expected, modeled, and reinforced at every level of leadership.

Integrity also shows up through trustworthiness, accountability, and reliability in both major responsibilities and small everyday actions. Individuals with integrity keep their commitments, admit mistakes without hesitation, and take responsibility for outcomes, demonstrating that their word can be relied upon in every circumstance. They make decisions based on principles rather than personal convenience, maintain high ethical standards even under pressure, and lead by example in ways that strengthen trust, credibility, and confidence across the organization.

Finally, integrity is expressed through how people treat others--supporting colleagues, respecting diverse perspectives, and building sincere, dependable relationships. It includes professionalism, emotional maturity, and self-regulation, especially in challenging interactions, as well as fostering an environment where others feel valued, heard, and encouraged to grow. By combining principled behavior with respect, fairness, and genuine care for others, individuals with integrity create workplaces defined by trust, collaboration, and a shared commitment to doing what is right.
Core Components of Integrity:
  • Integrity as a Core Value: Integrity as a Core Value focuses on the foundation and culture of integrity within an organization or individual. It involves embedding integrity into core principles, fostering a culture of professionalism, mutual respect, and ethical behavior, and demonstrating consistency in actions that align with corporate and personal values. This dimension highlights the overarching commitment to making integrity central to an organization's identity and leadership approach.
  • Trustworthy: Trustworthy focuses on consistency, reliability, and confidence-building. It involves earning and maintaining the trust of others through dependable actions, fostering strong relationships, and creating an environment where trust drives long-term success. This dimension emphasizes being someone others can rely on in all circumstances, underpinned by a foundation of mutual respect and transparency.
  • Honesty: Honesty centers on truthfulness and openness. It highlights being upfront, sincere, and transparent in all dealings, regardless of the situation. This dimension emphasizes the act of consistently providing accurate and truthful information, promoting a culture where integrity and ethical behavior are encouraged.
  • Transparency: Transparency focuses on open and honest communication. It involves sharing pertinent information--both good and bad--being truthful about capabilities, decisions, and actions, and avoiding withholding or misrepresenting data. This dimension builds trust by promoting clarity and openness in interactions, ensuring that all stakeholders have access to the information needed to create a respectful and supportive environment.
  • Accountability: Accountability emphasizes ownership and responsibility for actions and outcomes. It involves acknowledging mistakes, holding oneself and others accountable for aligning actions with ethical standards and organizational values, and ensuring that responsibilities are fulfilled with integrity. This dimension promotes trust and dependability through consistent follow-through and a commitment to ethical behavior.
  • Admits to Mistakes: Admits to Mistakes emphasizes accountability and transparency in specific situations. It focuses on the ability to own up to errors proactively, take responsibility for shortcomings, and address them openly and ethically.
  • Keeps Commitments: Keeps Commitments emphasizes reliability and responsibility in fulfilling promises, obligations, and tasks. It centers on ensuring continuity between words and actions, delivering results as pledged, and building trust through consistent follow-through.
  • Leads by Example: Leads by Example focuses on setting a standard through visible actions and influence. This dimension highlights demonstrating unwavering commitment to ethical principles and excellence, inspiring others by modeling integrity, and fostering a culture of achievement and ethical behavior.
  • Fairness: Fairness focuses on the equitable treatment of individuals and consistent application of policies. It emphasizes actions such as allocating responsibilities based on skills, ensuring inclusivity and equal access to opportunities, and using objective criteria for evaluations and compensation.
  • Confidentiality: Confidentiality focuses on protecting sensitive information and respecting privacy. It involves maintaining the security and integrity of data, implementing measures like encryption and access controls, and ensuring that confidential details are handled responsibly. This dimension highlights safeguarding trust through ethical handling of information and promoting discretion within personal or organizational contexts.
  • Ethical: Ethical encompasses a broader commitment to moral principles and responsible behavior. It involves adhering to high ethical standards, acting with integrity, and fostering a culture of ethical decision-making through tools like Codes of Conduct and compliance programs. This dimension highlights accountability, trustworthiness, and the importance of doing the right thing even under challenging circumstances.
  • Consistency in Principles: Consistency in Principles focuses on reliability and steadfastness in ethical behavior. It highlights the ability to act ethically and maintain integrity across all situations, ensuring alignment between actions, values, and organizational standards at all times. This dimension emphasizes being dependable and consistent in ethical conduct, which fosters trust and credibility.
Why is Integrity important in the workplace?
Integrity is an important competency for several reasons:
  • Building Trust: Trust among colleagues, clients, and partners, creates a strong foundation for professional relationships to grow.
  • Honesty: Integrity involves being truthful in all professional interactions, which helps build credibility and trust.
  • Transparent: Open communication and sharing information promote a transparent work environment, enhancing mutual respect and cooperation.
  • Accountability: Integrity helps create a culture of accountability and transparency, leading to better performance and continuous improvement.
  • Keeping Commitments: Upholding promises and fulfilling responsibilities demonstrates reliability and strengthens professional relationships.
  • Being Principled in Small Matters: Consistently upholding ethical standards, even in minor issues, reinforces the your commitment to integrity.
  • Professionalism and Respect: Valuing, respecting, and treating others with kindness emphasizes your core principles of equality, fairness and justice.
What are key aspects of Integrity?
  • Trustworthiness and Honesty
  • Being accountable and admitting mistakes
  • Transparency and Fairness
  • Keeping Commitments
  • Accepting Responsibility and Leading by Example
  • Maintaining confidentiality and being ethical
  • Being consistent in core principles
  • Is principled even in small matters
  • Be professional and respect others
How can I improve my Integrity?
  • Lead by Example: Demonstrate integrity in your actions and decisions. Show honesty, fairness, and ethical behavior in all situations, setting a positive example for your team.
  • Transparency in Communication: Be open and honest in your communication. Share information clearly and truthfully, and encourage open dialogue within your team.
  • Admit Mistakes: Acknowledge and take responsibility for your mistakes. Apologize when necessary and focus on finding solutions and learning from the experience.
  • Uphold your Commitments: Keep your promises and fulfill your responsibilities consistently. This builds trust and reliability among your team members.
  • Always Be Fair: Ensure that your actions and decisions are fair and unbiased. Treat all team members equally and provide equal opportunities for growth and development.
  • Respect Confidentiality: Protect sensitive information and maintain privacy. This demonstrates respect for your team members and reinforces their trust in you.
  • Encourage Ethical Behavior: Foster a culture of integrity by promoting ethical behavior and holding your team accountable to high standards.
  • Exhibit Professionalism: Maintain a strong unwavering support for professional standards and behavior.
What questions could be included on a 360-degree survey that measure integrity?
When creating a questionnaire to measure integrity, ensure it includes items that assess trustworthiness, honesty, transparency, and accountability. Additionally, include items that evaluate the willingness to admit mistakes, keep commitments, lead by example, and uphold fairness and ethics. It is crucial to measure the consistency of these core principles and to evaluate principled behavior in both significant and minor matters.

Questionnaire Items to Include



Integrity as a Core Value
Integrity as a Core Value is about the organizational and cultural foundation of integrity. It reflects how leaders embed integrity into the identity of the workplace--setting high standards, modeling consistent values, and fostering professionalism, mutual respect, and ethical behavior across the entire environment. This dimension is broad and systemic: it focuses on creating cultures where integrity is expected, reinforced, and woven into leadership, relationships, and everyday decision-making. It's about shaping the norms, expectations, and principles that guide how people behave and interact.


Trustworthy
Trustworthy is about the individual experience others have with a person's reliability and honesty. It reflects consistent behavior that earns confidence--being someone others can rely on in every circumstance, maintaining transparent communication, and building strong trust-based relationships. This dimension is interpersonal and outcome-focused: it centers on how dependably a person acts, how they maintain trust over time, and how their behavior strengthens long-term relationships. While Integrity as a Core Value sets the cultural stage, Trustworthy describes the personal credibility that emerges from dependable, honest actions.


Honesty
Honesty focuses on truthfulness in content--the accuracy, sincerity, and straightforwardness of what a person says. It is about telling the truth, being upfront, and providing information that is correct, sincere, and justified. Someone demonstrating Honesty communicates truthfully in all situations, gives accurate reports, and maintains sincerity even in minor interactions. The emphasis is on the truthfulness of the message itself: the words, facts, and statements shared. Honesty answers the question, "Is what I'm saying true, accurate, and sincere?"


Transparency
Transparency focuses on openness in process--sharing information fully, making decisions visible, and ensuring others have access to the details they need. It involves disclosing both good and bad news, explaining reasoning, revealing capabilities and limitations, and avoiding withholding relevant information. Someone demonstrating Transparency communicates openly, shares all pertinent information, and ensures stakeholders understand context and implications. The emphasis is on the flow and completeness of information: how openly, broadly, and accessibly information is shared. Transparency answers the question, "Am I making information visible, accessible, and complete so others can understand and act?"


Accountability
Accountability reflects ongoing ownership of actions, decisions, and outcomes. It is broad, continuous, and applies to both positive and negative results. Someone demonstrating Accountability ensures responsibilities are fulfilled with integrity, aligns actions with organizational values, and holds both themselves and others responsible for ethical conduct. It includes taking ownership of processes, outcomes, and expectations, fostering a culture where responsibility is shared and consistently upheld. Accountability is about being answerable for the full scope of one's role--before, during, and after mistakes occur.


Admits to Mistakes
Admits to Mistakes focuses on how a person responds when something goes wrong. This dimension emphasizes proactively acknowledging errors, addressing shortcomings openly, and demonstrating transparency even when the truth is uncomfortable. It is about ethical courage in the moment: owning up without prompting, communicating openly, and taking corrective action to rebuild trust. While Accountability covers the entire landscape of responsibility, Admits to Mistakes zooms in on the ethical response to error--the honesty, openness, and willingness to learn that strengthens credibility and trust.


Keeps Commitments
Keeps Commitments is about reliability and follow-through. It focuses on the discipline of doing exactly what was promised--meeting obligations, honoring commitments, and ensuring continuity between words and actions. This dimension is transactional and execution-focused: it's about delivering results consistently, fulfilling promises, and reinforcing trust through dependable behavior. Someone who "Keeps Commitments" builds credibility by being predictably reliable, completing tasks as pledged, and demonstrating that others can count on them to follow through every time.


Leads by Example
Leads by Example is about influence and modeling integrity. It reflects how a person's behavior sets the tone for others--demonstrating ethical standards, strong work ethic, and excellence in a way that inspires people to elevate their own conduct. This dimension is leadership-focused: it's not just about fulfilling one's own commitments, but about showing others what integrity looks like in practice and motivating them to uphold the same standards. Someone who "Leads by Example" shapes culture through visible actions, reinforcing integrity by embodying it and encouraging others to do the same.


Fairness
Fairness focuses on equitable treatment and impartial decision-making. It is about ensuring that policies, opportunities, evaluations, and workloads are applied consistently and without favoritism. This dimension emphasizes objectivity, inclusivity, and justice--treating everyone with respect regardless of role or status, distributing responsibilities based on skill, and using standardized criteria to evaluate performance. Fairness protects the integrity of organizational processes by making sure people are judged and treated according to clear, unbiased standards. Fairness is about how people are treated and whether decisions are made ethically, consistently, and without prejudice.


Confidentiality
Confidentiality focuses on protecting sensitive information and respecting privacy. It involves safeguarding employee, customer, and organizational data through secure handling practices, access controls, audits, encryption, and proper training. This dimension emphasizes discretion, legal compliance, and ethical responsibility in managing information that should not be shared. Confidentiality protects individuals and the organization by ensuring private or sensitive data remains secure and is only accessed by authorized people. Confidentiality is about ethical information stewardship--keeping data safe, private, and handled with integrity.


Ethical
Ethical reflects a broad, principle-driven commitment to doing what is morally right and fostering an ethical culture across the organization. It involves upholding high ethical standards, acting responsibly, and ensuring that decisions consistently align with moral principles and organizational values. This dimension also includes building systems--Codes of Conduct, compliance programs, ethics guidelines--that help employees navigate dilemmas and maintain integrity. Ethical behavior is both personal and structural: it's about doing the right thing and creating an environment where ethical decision-making is expected, supported, and reinforced.


Consistency in Principles
Consistency in Principles is about the steadfastness and uniformity of ethical behavior across all situations. It emphasizes being the same principled person in public and private, maintaining integrity even when no one is watching, and demonstrating unwavering adherence to core values regardless of pressure, convenience, or circumstance. This dimension focuses on reliability of character--showing honesty, fairness, and professionalism every time, in every context. Consistency in Principles highlights the predictability and constancy of standards in daily behavior, ensuring trust through unwavering alignment with core values.


Maintains Core Principles
Maintains Core Principles reflects big-picture, high-stakes integrity. It focuses on making decisions rooted in core values--even when the consequences are difficult, the pressure is high, or the situation is ethically complex. This dimension is about moral courage: prioritizing long-term trust over short-term convenience, adhering to ethical, legal, and regulatory standards, and demonstrating unwavering commitment to what is right. It deals with foundational principles that guide major decisions, organizational conduct, and the integrity of critical processes such as reporting, compliance, and stakeholder trust. Maintains Core Principles is about staying true to core values when it matters most.


Principled in Small Matters
Principled in Small Matters reflects everyday integrity in the details. It focuses on the small, routine behaviors that signal reliability, respect, and ethical consistency--following through on minor commitments, correcting small mistakes, paying attention to detail, and showing appreciation for small contributions. This dimension emphasizes that integrity is built through daily habits and micro-behaviors, and that small lapses can erode trust just as easily as major ones. It reinforces the idea that ethical behavior is not only for big decisions but also for the "little things" that shape reputation, relationships, and organizational culture. Principled in Small Matters is about demonstrating integrity in the small actions that collectively define character.


Supports Others
Supports Others reflects the active, helping side of integrity--behaviors that lift people up, strengthen their performance, and create an environment where individuals feel encouraged, supported, and able to grow. It is about offering mentorship, guidance, encouragement, and reliable information so others can succeed. This dimension emphasizes proactive assistance: recognizing achievements, creating psychological safety, helping colleagues develop professionally, and serving customers with integrity. Supports Others shows integrity through action that empowers, demonstrating a commitment to others' success and well-being.


Respects Others
Respects Others reflects the ethical stance behind how people are treated. It centers on fairness, courtesy, kindness, and valuing others' dignity--regardless of differences in beliefs, roles, or circumstances. This dimension emphasizes moral principles such as justice, tolerance, and honesty in interpersonal interactions. Respecting Others means responding with courtesy even when situations are difficult, addressing concerns directly rather than behind someone's back, and ensuring everyone feels valued. Respects Others shows integrity through consistent regard for people's dignity, forming the ethical foundation upon which supportive actions can genuinely stand.


Exhibits Professionalism
Exhibits Professionalism reflects how a person conducts themselves, especially under pressure, conflict, or challenging interpersonal situations. It emphasizes emotional maturity, composure, courtesy, and a commitment to excellence--even when others behave poorly. This dimension is about modeling high professional standards, protecting the organization's reputation, and demonstrating steady, principled behavior that sets the tone for a respectful, high-performing workplace. In essence, Exhibits Professionalism is inwardly focused: it highlights self-management, discipline, and the ability to rise above frustration to do what is right.


Interpersonal Relationships
Interpersonal Relationships reflects how a person connects with others. It emphasizes sincerity, trust, fairness, dependability, and the ability to build strong, positive relationships. This dimension is outwardly focused: it centers on the quality of interactions, the trust one earns, and the reliability others experience in day-to-day relationships. Interpersonal Relationships is about forming and sustaining trust-based connections through honesty, fairness, and integrity.


Self-Regulation
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