Everyone Wants Integrity, But No One Knows How To Measure It

Forbes

02-05-2025

De-risking leadership selection is vital to improving team and organizational moral and performance, partly by reducing the probability of selecting unethical or immoral leaders.
An evil devil or Satan businessman in business suit pointing at the viewer
When it comes to leadership, few qualities are praised more universally—or more naively—than integrity. And for good reason. A meta-analysis of 665 correlations found that integrity isn't just a 'nice-to-have' trait—it's one of the most reliable predictors of leadership effectiveness, employee satisfaction, and organizational performance. Teams led by honest, ethical leaders tend to outperform, trust more, and burn out less. So, yes, integrity matters.
And yet, the business world is littered with cautionary tales of leaders who lacked it. From the predictable implosions of Enron and Theranos to the more insidious forms of everyday corporate toxicity—bullying, gaslighting, backstabbing, and Machiavellian scheming—it's clear that unethical leadership isn't rare; it's rampant. Despite near-universal agreement on its importance, integrity remains the leadership trait we most admire and least reliably detect.
According to the United Nations, corruption and illicit financial flows cost the global economy approximately $3.6 trillion each year. This figure includes $1 trillion in bribes and an estimated $2.6 trillion stolen annually through corruption, amounting to more than 5% of global GDP.
Everyone Wants Integrity, But No One Knows How to Measure It
Part of the problem is conceptual: integrity is easy to revere in theory, but maddeningly hard to pin down in practice. It's not binary. Nobody is a moral saint. Even the most principled individuals will occasionally shade the truth, hide inconvenient facts, or bend the rules under pressure. As Warren Buffett famously noted, it takes 20-years to build a reputation and 5-minutes to ruin it. On the flip side, those who are truly corrupt—pathological liars, opportunistic fraudsters, and narcissistic manipulators — are, by definition, quite good at pretending otherwise. To make matters worse, these toxic individuals may be honest at times…
This is the paradox I explore in my upcoming book Don't Be Yourself: Why Authenticity is Overrated and What to Do Instead, the world rewards those who are better at managing impressions than managing themselves. The cult of authenticity—'just be who you are!'—sounds noble, but if who you are is a charming sociopath, you might climb pretty far before anyone catches on. In fact, some of the most successful people score high on deceptive self-presentation: they know what to say, when to say it, and how to game the system.
More often than not, organizations do little to improve things, including when they advertise strategic efforts to boost integrity and ethics. As Alison Taylor, an NYU professor and the author of Higher Ground noted, "What companies name 'business ethics' is usually a set of functions and processes designed to deflect reputational risk... These tools are becoming less and less effective in a hyper-transparent environment, where the boundaries between corporations and society are dissolving.'
So, if we can't trust leaders to self-report their integrity, and we can't always detect it in their behavior until it's too late, how are we supposed to assess it?
The Traditional Tools: Flawed but Useful
Psychologists and HR professionals have tried. Here are the main approaches—and their limitations:
Different approaches to measuring integrity
While these methods offer some insight, none are foolproof. Most are designed for lab conditions, not high-stakes boardroom power plays. All of them signal probability or statistical likelihood of an event at best. And as anyone who's worked in corporate leadership knows, what people say about ethics and what they do when bonuses or reputation are on the line can be wildly different. So much so, that the 'say-do' gap has become a relevant signal or marker of integrity per se!
Can AI and Surveillance Save Us From Dishonest Leaders?
This is where technology enters the chat—uninvited but not unwelcome. Could AI, data scraping, and behavioral analytics finally crack the code?
In a world increasingly shaped by what Shoshana Zuboff called surveillance capitalism, we already leave behind a trail of behavioral breadcrumbs. Emails, Slack messages, performance reviews, even LinkedIn endorsements—these are all data points (as first evidenced by the pioneering academic research of Professor Michal Kosinski and colleagues). Combine them with language analysis, sentiment tracking, and natural language processing, and you start to build a picture not just of what someone does, but how they behave over time. Together with my colleagues Dr. Reece Akthar and Uri Ort, we have demonstrated how digital footprints can be used to reliably infer leaders' deviant, counterproductive, and unethical tendencies.
AI detection of integrity
The German saying 'Vertrauen ist gut, aber Kontrolle ist besser' ('Trust is good, but control/cheking is better') may feel like a punchline from a Black Mirror episode, but it captures a real corporate dilemma. Surveillance feels ethically icky—until you consider its potential to flag actual ethical breaches before they cause harm. The tension is real: we want to protect privacy, but we also want to prevent fraud, abuse, and toxic leadership. We can't have both.
Still, data without interpretation is just noise. AI might help detect patterns of behavior—but it can't (yet) infer intent. And ethical behavior, after all, is all about intention: doing the right thing even when no one is watching.
The Best Predictor of Future Integrity Is... Past Behavior
Here's the uncomfortable truth: people are not entirely predictable, but they (AKA 'we', including you and I) are consistent. Character, like personality, tends to be stable over time. Which is why, as psychologists Robert Hogan and Rob Kaiser have long argued, the best way to assess a leader's integrity is to talk to the people who work for them.
Forget what leaders say about themselves. Ask their direct reports, peers, and subordinates:
Reputation, not self-perception, is the gold standard for integrity. Feedback from 360-degree assessments, team reviews, and exit interviews can be more illuminating than any forced-choice questionnaire. Why? Because employees experience the real leader—not the polished interview version.
Indeed, the paradox of assessing integrity is that the more someone talks about being ethical, the more skeptical we should be. Truly ethical leaders don't need to remind you they're ethical. They just act that way. Ironically, this quiet consistency can work against them, as they may appear less 'ethical' than their more performative peers. After all, the least honest individuals are often the most skilled at social desirability and impression management—strategically charming others to gain their trust.
In Conclusion: Don't Rely on Haloes (Reputational Glow)
Assessing a leader's integrity is not about chasing unicorns or canonizing saints. It's about paying attention to patterns, ignoring charm, and trusting those with firsthand exposure. Everyone can fake virtue in short bursts. But consistency over time is much harder to manufacture.
So, the next time you're tasked with evaluating a leader's character, resist the urge to ask: 'Do they seem ethical?' Instead, ask: 'Would you trust them to have your back—even if nobody else is watching?'
Trust is always a bet. No matter how reliable someone has been, no matter how many times they've shown up, there's always the possibility that tomorrow they won't—and suddenly, we're toast. As the old saying goes: 'Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.' At its core, trust is a psychological wager on someone else's future behavior. We're placing bets, not certainties, on whether people will continue to align with our expectations, values, or interests.
The good news? While we can't eliminate the risk, we can get smarter about how we place those bets. If we pay close attention—really observe someone's behavior, motivations, values, and incentives—we can increase our odds. We'll still get it wrong sometimes, but the goal isn't perfection; it's improving the quality of our mistakes. It's about becoming wiser in whom we trust, and quicker to learn when we've misplaced that trust.
Too much naïveté leaves us vulnerable; too much paranoia makes life unbearable. So what's the answer? Hedge your bets. Build safeguards. Expect to be wrong occasionally—but aim to be wrong less dramatically, and more recoverably. In the end, trust is a risk worth managing, not avoiding.