Imagine a staff briefing in early September. The headteacher, who is entirely imaginary, stands up and says that this year the school will protect teachers’ time. Fewer meetings, no emails expected after six, and a promise that any new initiative will arrive with something else taken away.
Most of the room wants to believe it. By the end of October, a new data deadline has appeared with a fortnight’s notice. Two extra meetings have found their way onto the calendar. A handful of emails land at half past nine at night, each politely saying there is no need to reply until the morning.
None of these things is a scandal, and each has a reasonable explanation. Yet something has shifted in that staffroom. The next time the headteacher talks about wellbeing, people will listen differently. They will not argue. They will simply wait to see what happens.
I think that quiet waiting is one of the most important things a school leader can learn to notice.
A name for the gap
The management researcher Tony Simons gave this a name in a 2002 paper in Organization Science: behavioural integrity. He described it as the perceived pattern of alignment between a manager’s words and deeds, paying special attention to whether promises are kept and whether the values a leader espouses are the values they enact.
Two words in that idea do a lot of work. The first is perceived. Behavioural integrity is not a measure of what a leader intends, or even of everything they do. It sits in the minds of the people watching. The second is pattern. One missed promise rarely defines anyone. It is the accumulation that people read.
This makes it different from the question of whether a leader holds good values. A head can sincerely care about staff wellbeing and still, through a run of sensible-looking decisions, become someone whose words people have learned to discount.
What the research suggests
In 2015, Simons and three colleagues published a meta-analysis of behavioural integrity research in the Journal of Business Ethics. They compared it with two related ideas: moral integrity, meaning whether a leader is seen to act on sound ethical principles, and psychological contract breach, meaning whether employees feel that promises made to them have been broken. Behavioural integrity had stronger links with trust, task performance and citizenship behaviour (the discretionary extra effort people put in at work) than moral integrity did. It also had stronger links with commitment and citizenship behaviour than psychological contract breach. The authors admit this ran counter to their own expectations. Their explanation is that the alignment of words and deeds affects how clearly a leader’s messages are understood, as well as how people feel about that leader.
Two cautions belong here. Most of this research comes from workplaces rather than schools. Much of it is also correlational, so it shows that perceived alignment tends to travel alongside trust and effort, without proving that one causes the other.
School-based research points in a similar direction. Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider spent almost a decade studying more than 400 Chicago elementary schools. In their 2003 article for Educational Leadership, they describe relational trust as resting on respect, personal regard, competence and personal integrity. They put the integrity question plainly: “The first question that we ask is whether we can trust others to keep their word.” Effective principals, they write, couple a compelling vision with behaviour that clearly seeks to advance it, and “this consistency between words and actions affirms their personal integrity.”
They also report that schools with high relational trust were much more likely to show marked improvements in student learning. A school with a low trust score at the end of the study had only a one-in-seven chance of improving its academic productivity, while half of the high-trust schools were in the improving group. Again, this is an association. Trust was one strand in a complicated picture of reform, in one city, during one particular period of change.
Megan Tschannen-Moran and Wayne Hoy’s review of the research on trust, written with schools in mind, offers a helpful lens. They define trust as one party’s willingness to be vulnerable to another, based on confidence that the other is benevolent, reliable, competent, honest and open. Of those five, reliability may be the one leaders most easily overlook. Colleagues can believe we care about them and still decide they cannot count on us.
Why this is a question about character
This is where the research connects with my wider interest. In their 2005 study of ethical leadership, Michael Brown, Linda Treviño and David Harrison drew on social learning theory. They argued that leaders influence the ethical conduct of others largely by being credible role models, and noted that employees may be cynical about ethical pronouncements from leaders. In their account, credibility is earned through conduct that others judge to be honest, considerate and fair.
Schools add a second audience. Children watch how adults treat one another, something I explored in When Adults Lose Control. If staff hear that honesty and kindness matter, then watch those values bend whenever they become inconvenient, the lesson that eventually reaches the classroom is that values are things we say. That is the opposite of what character education is trying to build.
I have argued before that compliance is not character. The same is true of adults. Staff can comply with a leader they do not trust, but they are unlikely to make that leader’s values their own. This sits close to the territory of my doctoral studies in ethical leadership, though what follows is practical reflection rather than a finding from that unfinished research.
Questions worth asking ourselves
Because behavioural integrity lives in other people’s perceptions, it is hard to judge from the inside. Leaders usually know the reason behind each broken commitment, which makes every one of them feel excusable. Colleagues often see only the pattern. A few questions may help close that gap.
What did I promise this term, and would my colleagues say I kept it? The test is what they experienced, not what I intended.
When I had to change course, did I say so before anyone noticed? Explaining a change openly is a different act from letting a commitment quietly slide. It draws on the honesty and openness that Tschannen-Moran and Hoy place alongside reliability.
Am I promising more than I can deliver? I suspect a modest promise that is kept does more for trust than a generous one that is later abandoned.
Which of our stated values could a new colleague see in action within their first week? If the honest answer is none, those values are living on the website rather than in the building.
Each of these is really a version of one of the questions at the heart of the Character Loop: “What does that say about you?” It is usually asked of children after a choice they have made. It is just as fair to turn it on ourselves. If I look at my decisions this half term rather than my speeches, what do they say I value?
Concluding thoughts…
The imaginary headteacher from September was not dishonest, and most people who lead schools are not. The gap between words and actions usually opens through reasonable decisions made one at a time, under pressure, by people who still believe what they said.
That is exactly why it deserves attention. Staff rarely confront it. They adjust how much weight they give our words and get on with the job, and trust that took years to build can thin out over a single term without anyone saying a thing.
Perhaps the most useful habit is a modest one: keep a short list of what we have promised, check it honestly, and say so out loud when we fall short. Children learn what integrity looks like partly by watching the adults around them, and our colleagues are watching too.
References
Brown, M. E., Treviño, L. K., & Harrison, D. A. (2005). Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.03.002
Bryk, A. S., & Schneider, B. (2003). Trust in schools: A core resource for school reform. Educational Leadership, 60(6), 40–44. ASCD
Simons, T. (2002). Behavioral integrity: The perceived alignment between managers’ words and deeds as a research focus. Organization Science, 13(1), 18–35. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.13.1.18.543
Simons, T., Leroy, H., Collewaert, V., & Masschelein, S. (2015). How leader alignment of words and deeds affects followers: A meta-analysis of behavioral integrity research. Journal of Business Ethics, 132(4), 831–844. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2332-3
Tschannen-Moran, M., & Hoy, W. K. (2000). A multidisciplinary analysis of the nature, meaning, and measurement of trust. Review of Educational Research, 70(4), 547–593. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543070004547