Pentagon of Integrity

There are five basic sources of pressures individuals face in daily activities.The ability to resist these temptations creates the core of an individual's ethical character.
The categories of temptations can be summa­rized as follows:

 POWER - There are five principal types of power sought in our society:

Political - The drive to accumulate constituents/votes.

Religious - The motivation to acquire followers to a particular belief.

Causes - The motivation to attract support­ers for special interest groups.

Competitive - The need to amass customers,  generally at the expense of a rival entity.

Pentagon of Integrity



Individual - The necessity to exert control over others in relationships (subordinates, co-workers, family members, etc.).

WEALTH - The inner drive to amass financial leverage, in three primary forms:  income; asset accumulation; and economic influence.

STATUS - The motivation to acquire fame, identity, rank/position and/or affiliation.

EMOTIONS (Irrational emotions) - This temptation category is confined to those feelings generally considered "irrational," such as:  revenge; hatred; bigotry; fear; anger; envy; etc.

PERSONAL COMFORT - This classification of pres­sure on the individual includes such consider­ations as:  ease of lifestyle; personal conve­nience; conflict avoidance; fear of involvement, retribution, job loss; etc.



Impact of Pressures/Temptations



PENTAGON OF INTEGRITY - The accompanying figures illustrate the relationship of the five categories of temptations relative to the ethics of the individual.  Each day, the person may be subjected to any, or perhaps all, of these pressures. 



 

When an individual surrenders to any of these  pressures,  personal  ethics are proportionally diminished.  From this perspective then, a person cannot be partially ethical. Using the concept of power for illustration, the following scenarios emerge:



• A politician votes against his/her conscience, fully cognizant of the impact the action will have

on the public, in order to gain the support of a special interest group(s)

• A member of the clergy uses questionable advertising techniques to attract new adherents, thereby increasing his/her influence.

• An environmental group distorts the facts of a situation to sway public opinion to its advantage.



Diminished Ethical Core

As the accumulation of power increases, the individual's ethical core becomes smaller. This is equally true of the other four categories of temptation.


If the person allows himself/herself to be swayed by more than one of these pressures, the ethical core diminishes much more substantially, as indicated. In this situa­tion, the individual has succumbed to both power and wealth pressures. It becomes easy to visualize the impact of additional temptations.

A significant conflict arises, due to the fact that our culture encourages pursuit of power, wealth, status and personal comfort. In addition, irratio­nal emotions are quite often manipulated in the quest for power, wealth, status and personal comfort. For example, bigotry is promoted by some as a means of acquiring the various forms of power described above.

Originally appeared in Ethics in Organizational Behavior (1994) by Michael Smith CPA, MBA