Building Ethical Organisations: The Importance of Organisational Integrity Systems

What can be done to protect ethics and integrity and to curb corruption and integrity violations, especially in the (semi-)public sector? The present chapter focuses on that question with an emphasis on the organisational level, namely on the whole of instruments, methods, strategies, institutions and actions whose aim is to guarantee integrity within an organisation. First, the central concepts will briefly be clarified: ethics, integrity, corruption, as well as public administration and governance, and what an organisational integrity system is. An overview of the literature and empirical research leads to an evaluation framework which can be used to study and assess the quality of an organisational integrity system and is applicable, we hypothesise, for all (semi-)public-sector organisations and most private-sector organisations in the Western world.