Integrity in organisations: a definition and phenomenology

Like any virtue, integrity is an act and a disposition. The act is, in the case of integrity, the fact of honouring one's promise to be just. The disposition consists of the will to be a person of integrity and of the practical wisdom that allows one to know what to do, in the circumstances that arise, in order to have integrity. The question that arises then is how integrity emerges concretely in an organisation. Vandekerckhove (2010) has emphasised the importance of intersubjectivity. This short paper aims to trace a line of research in this area based on the phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur. It suggests that the exchange of memories that takes place during colleagues' self-narratives makes them aware that they are authors of their actions, a necessary condition for integrity according to Giroux (1990). Furthermore, Nussbaum (2010) emphasised how the model of success presented to an imperfectly mature person could influence him or her, either in the sense of instrumentalisation of others or in the sense of mutual dependence. She coined the concept of a pernicious structure as one in which imperfect people become worse. We hypothesise that in organisations with integrity, self-narratives are more focused on mutual dependence than on the instrumentalisation of others. I would be interested to have feed-back on the definition of integrity I proposed and discuss with colleagues of the avenue I suggest concerning the phenomenology of its emergence.