Exploring Antecedents of Leader Integrity in Public Organizations: Qualitative Research

Leader`s integrity is a critical factor for the success of the leadership and foundation of trust-building in the organization. The main objective of this study is to explore the nature and antecedents of leader`s integrity in public organizations. With applying theme analysis method for this purpose, deep interviews conducted. First, relying on existing literature, the nature of the phenomenon was specified. Then interview data were coded and the relationship between categories and themes were discovered as an "antecedents of Leader integrity". This model contains individual factors: manager's personality traits (self-esteem, commitment and responsibility, Machiavellianism), moral intelligence and managerial moderator factors (job characteristics and managerial skill and ability) and organizational moderator factors: (moral role models, expectations of management, transparency of policies, laws and practices and whistleblowers activities within the organization).