Video Transcript:
Behavioral Integrity is the most powerful driver of business success that you’ve never heard of.
Behavioral Integrity is your employee’s perception of your word-deed alignment. Word-deed alignment includes things like whether you do what you say you will do, whether you model your personally espoused values or those of your organization and whether you embrace the changes you’ve championed in your workplace.
Tony Simons identified Behavioral Integrity and its powerful impact over twenty years ago. In 2022, he and his research team published insights from dozens of studies validating Behavioral Integrity’s benefits in various industries worldwide.
The graphic below (from the 2022 study) shows how employees’ observations of a manager’s word-deed alignment affect employee trust. If a leader or manager demonstrates word-deed alignment, employees will perceive that this leader has Behavioral Integrity, which translates into employee trust.
Employee trust generates four powerfully beneficial outcomes for that leader and the team: employee willingness to embrace espoused change, employee intent to stay with the organization, employee organizational citizenship behavior and employee performance.
Conversely, research has found that leader word-deed mismatches quash those beneficial outcomes. In addition, mismatches boost employee cynicism and negatively affect employee loyalty, satisfaction, commitment and performance.
Two studies found that adding values increases the impact of Behavioral Integrity. Tomlinson et al. (2014) proved that value congruence — an agreement between a leader’s espoused and enacted values matters, especially when employees care about those values — increases Behavioral Integrity. Peng and Wei (2020) found that a leader’s Behavioral Integrity increases when the leader emphasizes ethical values, including respect and validation.
These studies clarify that leaders must demonstrate word-deed alignment to achieve and sustain the four beneficial outcomes. The only way every leader and team member will embrace word-deed alignment in your work culture is for senior leaders to model the organization’s valued behaviors themselves and hold every formal leader accountable for doing the same.
Senior leaders: Team leaders and team members’ Behavioral Integrity will only follow your Behavioral Integrity.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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