Integrity. We deal with this underlying moral issue in our everyday life. Most of our parents would have taught us during our growing up years that we must inculcate this virtue because it is the right thing to do. What is integrity? It means honesty - keeping to one’s word even if it costs us dearly to do so. If you pledge to ‘love, honour and cherish your spouse until death do you part’, you must honour that promise. If you agree to do a task, you must do it.
Sadly, there are just too many news to exemplify our compromises on the issue of integrity in the corporate world and it has somehow, become a norm and an ‘acceptable’ fashion at work. A deceitful lie may start out as something trivial, like lying to your mother that you did not eat the chocolate but you did or you call in your office for sick leave when you are actually not sick. Though a white lie is small and relatively harmless, it can become a bigger issue in life, for example, in the scandal of the Enron Corp case which has indeed eroded investors’ confidence to a low due to dishonest representation of corporate earnings. The end result is always not promising - you may get scolded by your mother, your boss may find you unreliable and a broken confidence of the investors which will take some time to build up again.
Why do we compromise our integrity? Every once in a while, we lie to our parents, friends, boss or clients as a form of denial of the facts or as a protection to ourselves from confrontation - so what is the big deal, you may ask? Well, lack of integrity only compounds a problem.
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