Quality & Integrity
Acting with quality and integrity, no matter in your work, academic, or daily life, is a key skill for success.
Specific professions have performance standards for quality, but there are also general standards which include such actions as:
- setting standards and criteria for excellence
- following through to ensure those standards are met with attention to detail – not just “getting it done”
- delivering work that’s complete, on time, and appropriate to requirements
- taking ownership of mistakes and working to correct them
- supporting others in their roles
- treating all players with respect
Key Takeaway
Quality is how well you do the work.
Integrity is how ethically you do it.
Read about the skills of quality and integrity in the following articles:
- High 5’s page on What is Work Quality? Types, Examples, and How to Increase It
- indeed.com’s page on Integrity in the Workplace: Why It Matters
- Santa Clara’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics’ page on Ethical Decision Making
Consider your own personal or work experience. Have you recently dealt with quality, integrity, and/or ethical issues? Have you been perplexed at how to handle them?
Read tips on honing your skills on Building Skills in Quality and Integrity, from ChatGPT.
Learning Activity for Quality & Integrity
Introductory Level
Read EthicsOps case studies on Phantom Expenses and Less Sugar, with their different approaches to dealing with each case, as well as the comparison of approaches that leads to the final conclusion.
Also review the Ethical Decision Making page, and apply that approach to the cases as well, as you consider them.
Then choose one of the following scenarios, or use one your own, and apply one or a combination of the ethical decision-making approaches to analyze the issue and suggest follow-up action:
- Two team members are discussing another team member’s failure to perform. This has caused the rest of the team to work harder. The two who are being critical emphasize the other member’s lack of skill and problem-solving capabilities. They criticize the member’s follow-through efforts and lack of productivity. You are stuck in the room and feel very uncomfortable about this discussion. What can you do?
- A coworker is consistently late, and you know it’s because of his home situation; however, he continues to slide into work unnoticed. Others have to cover for this coworker. What should you do?
- You hear a colleague make a pejorative slur against a racial or ethnic group. Do you address it?
- You are in a team meeting. An issue is being discussed and everyone is asked to raise hands if you agree on a solution. Every other member raises his/her hand, but you don’t agree. You would be the only one to disagree. Do you go along or not?
As you analyze your chosen issue, consider what the actual issue is, what the possible choices are, and what might be the best course of action.
Submit: analysis of an ethical dilemma, applying one or a combination of frameworks for analysis, identifying possible choices, and positing the best course of action, with an explanation of why it is the best course of action ethically
Learning Activity for Quality & Integrity
Advanced Level
Complete the initial learning activity.
Then consider quality standards. Since you are known in the workplace as an employee with high ethical standards, you have been asked to develop a brief training on quality and integrity in the workplace. You can also use this opportunity to address the ethical issues in which you have recently been involved.
Create a short training (no more than 5 minutes) covering the points you would include. Your training may be in any of the following formats:
- PowerPoint
- video
- Word document with information presented as you would present it on PowerPoint slides
If you work with a text-only format, make sure to include the narration you would use for each slide.
Submit:
- analysis of an ethical dilemma, applying one or a combination of frameworks for analysis, identifying possible choices, and positing the best course of action, with an explanation of why it is the best course of action ethically
- training for quality and integrity
