Professional Integrity in Business Management Education

Introduction

Professional integrity as an improvement concept to the actual values and virtues has meaningful managerial capabilities and attitudes to assume any professional task. The objective of this paper is to analyze the importance of professional integrity as the improvement concept and ethics in the development of professionals in administration and management sciences. The paper also pretends to present some suggestions of ethical and integrity program based in professional integrity that can lead the manager to a more ethical and humanistic practice based on a case at University Centre for Economic and Managerial Sciences, University of Guadalajara. Economic and political conditions of the globalization processes carry with them the elements toward the multinational integration which implies a higher professional competitiveness. Professionals have to be prepared for a global market constrained by time and resources for their basic developments. Thus, there is a need for optimizing the resources applied to the development of the new professionals. The most important change facing the new demands of education is the task of personal and professional integrity formation for the performance of citizenship and productive capabilities. Smith and Oakley (1994) concluded that personal integrity and ethical values of honesty were negatively correlated with formal education, not confirming the findings of previous research. Llano (1997) makes reference to a divorce between professional formation and the real labor market as the product of nonexistent but necessary synchronization, between the graduated professionals from Universities and technological institutes and the requirements of employers that have resulted to be devastating for the social responsibility that the organizations must fulfill. The manager’s success in the provision of services to individuals and society depends to a certain extent in the degree of knowledge, skills and experiences obtained in the classroom and the professional performance. Moreover, it depends of the achieved level of personal qualities development that distinguishes him/her as an individual, such as the professional integrity, independence, ethics, and so forth (AICPA, 1980, p. 16). There is a peremptory need to recover credibility, integrity and respect in the management profession through a truth reconstruction of the ethical and integrity fundamentals. Professional formation and development in management sciences conducted in Universities must specify the required behaviors for the professional integrity. The formation of professional integrity at University programs, more than the added value must be the inherent value expected to grant to the organizations and society as a whole.

Integrity is important to build a good society, a reason that makes necessary to define with precision the origin and sense of the term. Srivastva and Associates (1988) describe integrity with an emphasis on congruence, consistency, morality, universality and concern for others. Kerr (1988, pp. 126-127) lists the Ten Commandments of Executive Integrity. Covey (1992) describes integrity as honestly matching words and feelings with thoughts and actions for the good of others. A key component of integrity is the consistency between actions and words. Integrity is defined by the Webster’s New World Dictionary (1994) as: “1. the quality or state of being complete; unbroken condition; wholeness; entirety; 2. the quality or state of being unimpaired; perfect condition; soundness; and 3. the quality or state of being of sound moral principle; uprightness, honesty, and sincerity”. Integrity is a state or condition of being whole, complete, unbroken, unimpaired, sound, perfect condition. The word integrity suggests the wholeness of the person in such a way that can be said that person with integrity are whole as human beings. The term integrity refers to honesty, playing by the rules and not necessarily following the rules, which means setting aside in situations where people may be victimized.