Exploring the Role of Virtues in Determining Organizational Culture: A Planning Proposal

Organizational culture has been well researched. But the ethical culture of organizations—what we call the “culture of integrity”—remains relatively unexamined. This project is important because the time is right, the Institute’s cumulative work to date will inform our findings, and we strongly believe that integrity underpins organizational culture. This revised application is for a one-year planning grant to begin to determine the role of virtues within organizations. Specifically, are there core virtues critical to the ethical operation of an organization? Can these be identified, studied, and re-combined to create a model for a culture of integrity? To answer these questions, we propose to update our review of the literature, identify best-practice examples of ethical organizations, profile select organizations, and synthesize our findings. Based on this work, we hope to develop a hypothesis on the role of virtues in determining organizational culture and a proposal for researching that hypothesis. We expect to find that virtues are important in creating positive cultures, to identify those virtues most critical to that end, and to gather evidence for proposing a cultures-of-integrity model.