Judging a Corporate Leader's Integrity:: An Illustrated Three-Component Model

In recent years the integrity of corporate leaders has increasingly been questioned as allegations of moral misconduct or dubious decisions have been made. Indeed, integrity is an important element of leadership. We develop a theory-based model for judging a corporate leader's integrity and address the questions: What are the criteria for judging? When are integrity judgments particularly important? Who is the judge? We present three components of integrity criteria that enable the relevant set of moral values and norms of stakeholders to affect such judgments: laws, codes of conduct, and informal moral values and norms that relevant stakeholders expect a corporate leader to abide by. Such an integrity judgment is particularly relevant during times of change, when a new corporate leader is appointed, and when allegations of moral misconduct are made while a leader is in office. We illustrate our model with the Royal Ahold case.