Integrity as a Core Value: Harmonizing Six Virtues Through Four Quadrants of Moral Alignment
- Greg Mullen
- Jun 30
- 13 min read
Integrity is often described as “doing what’s right when nobody is looking.” In schools, it means staying true to what we believe is right, even when it’s hard or no one is checking on us. Integrity helps us connect what we believe, what we intend to do, and how we actually behave. When we lose sight of integrity, it’s easy to let convenience, peer pressure, or fear guide our choices. That’s when we risk becoming inconsistent, saying one thing and doing another, or changing our moral stance depending on who may be offering the best prize or what’s easiest at the moment.
In the Mullen Bioecological Model, integrity comes from two key ideas: consensus and consistency. Consensus is the shared understanding within a school or community about what’s right. It’s the agreements (spoken or unspoken) that help everyone work toward common values, like fairness, inclusion, or student voice. For example, a school might agree that every child deserves to feel safe and valued. Having this consensus provides the basis for developing integrity as a core value, though it does not guarantee it. Consistency is how we put those shared values into action over time in ways that match what we say we believe. This means a teacher who values student agency but never gives students a real voice in decisions related to what, when, how, or why learning happens in the classroom lacks consistency—and, in doing so, isn't devoid of integrity but rather an inconsistent understanding of it when it comes to that particular belief.
These two parts of integrity—consensus and consistency—lead us to two big questions about how we act with integrity:
Alignment in Beliefs asks: Are we trying to follow one shared moral framework (unity in beliefs), or are we balancing and respecting different beliefs within our community (diversity in beliefs)? A team that sticks to one clear code, like following school-wide rules about student safety, shows unity. A teacher who respects both school expectations and the cultural values of a family shows integrity by honoring diversity.
Grounding for Principles asks: Do we believe the right thing is in how we act (means define the ends), or in what result we achieve (ends justify the means)? A teacher who always uses fair, respectful processes with students believes the means matter most. Another teacher might bend the usual rules to protect a student or achieve a greater good, believing that the positive result is what really matters.
When these two ideas cross, they create four different ways integrity can show up:
The Principled Conformist sticks closely to shared rules and fair processes.
The Mission-Aligned Loyalist focuses on shared goals but is flexible about how to get there.
The Ethical Negotiator respects different beliefs and sticks to fair processes.
The Pragmatic Harmonizer adjusts both methods and goals to serve the greater good.
That's what this article explores -- different ways of showing integrity that shape how we express virtues like courage, kindness, and self-control. Integrity isn’t just one behavior; it’s a daily effort to stay true to our values through our daily expression of virtues as we experience the real challenges of teaching and learning.
Four Ways We Exhibit Integrity In Practice
Integrity doesn’t look the same in every situation. The way we live out integrity depends on how we balance two key questions:
Do we focus more on how we act (process), or what we achieve (outcome)?
Do we expect everyone to follow the same shared beliefs, or do we work to honor different beliefs?
When we combine these questions, we see four ways integrity can guide our choices — each with its own strengths and risks. Many people may find that they move between these quadrants depending on the situation. This kind of thoughtful shifting is not a sign of weak integrity and can, in fact, signal a moral maturity. It is in why we shift among these quadrants that our integrity is defined. If we adjust our approach to stay true to our core values, we are practicing integrity. But if we shift simply out of convenience, pressure, or self-interest, our integrity can noticeably break down.
Let’s take a closer look at Integrity's Four Quadrants:
Principled Conformist
(Unity in Beliefs + Means Define the Ends)
Integrity here means always following shared moral rules and fair processes. The focus is on doing things the “right” way according to common agreements, no matter what outcome results.
Classroom: A teacher applies the grading policy exactly as written for every student, believing fairness means no exceptions, even when a student faces a personal crisis.
Team/Staff: A grade-level team insists on following a district-approved curriculum map without deviation because they believe shared structure ensures equity across classrooms.
School policy: A principal enforces the dress code strictly for all students, regardless of individual circumstances, to uphold consistency and fairness schoolwide.
Mission-Aligned Loyalist
(Unity in Beliefs + Ends Justify the Means)
This expression of integrity focuses on achieving a shared moral goal. The main concern is reaching the agreed-upon outcome, even if it means adjusting how things are done along the way.
Classroom: A teacher bends a deadline to allow a struggling student to complete a major project, because helping the student succeed is more important than enforcing the original date.
Team/Staff: A team of teachers skips parts of the pacing guide to spend more time on social-emotional learning after noticing an increase in student anxiety.
School policy: A school leader fast-tracks approval for a new mental health program by streamlining normal committee processes to quickly meet a critical need.
Ethical Negotiator
(Diversity in Beliefs + Means Define the Ends)
Integrity here means respecting different viewpoints and values while insisting that the process stays fair and consistent. The emphasis is on navigating diversity through clear, steady methods.
Classroom: A teacher plans classroom holiday activities that honor school guidelines while thoughtfully including and respecting students from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds.
Team/Staff: A team develops a grading practice that balances district policy with accommodations for students with IEPs, ensuring consistency while honoring different needs.
School policy: A principal holds listening sessions with families from various backgrounds to shape school policies, ensuring all voices are heard while sticking to transparent decision-making processes.
Pragmatic Harmonizer
(Diversity in Beliefs + Ends Justify the Means)
Integrity in this form means aiming for the greater good while being flexible with both methods and outcomes. It’s about adapting to different values and circumstances to do what’s best overall.
Classroom: A teacher adjusts class rules during a crisis (like a student’s family emergency) to provide emotional support, even if it means relaxing usual expectations.
Team/Staff: A teaching team redesigns parts of a unit mid-year to better connect with the cultural backgrounds of a newly arrived group of students.
School policy: A principal temporarily alters attendance enforcement procedures during a community disaster, focusing on student well-being over strict rule adherence.
Integrity's Impact on Virtues & Vices
Six Core Virtues reflect many of our behaviors exhibited throughout a school day. Those behaviors often reflect, albeit inherently and occasionally unintentionally, a moral purpose. Integrity as a Core Value, as defined by this article thus far, ensures that these virtues are not expressed as random traits or simply habits of a situation but as consistent, intentional actions across contexts. When a person’s integrity is strong, courage can reflect true moral bravery across contexts; wit can uplift and connect with intention; pride can stem from authentic accomplishment and magnanimity can be offered in service rather than self-promotion with intention rather than intuition via social influence. It is this understanding of Integrity as a Core Value that can bind our beliefs, intentions, and behaviors to ensure these virtues are not just performed for appearances but are lived authentically across both easy and challenging moments.
Without integrity as a steady guide, these six core virtues can easily shift out of balance, turning into vices of either excess or deficiency. Courage can become recklessness or hesitation; wit can turn sharp and hurtful or fall silent; pride can veer toward arrogance or self-doubt. Magnanimity may slide into overextension or stinginess, friendliness into intrusion or coldness, and temperance into rigidity or indulgence.
The chart below shows how integrity, expressed through different quadrants, influences whether these virtues are practiced in healthy, balanced ways—or risk tipping too far in one direction. It highlights how our moral stance shapes not only what we do, but how we show up in our daily choices as educators and leaders.
Virtue | Principled Conformist | Mission-Aligned Loyalist | Ethical Negotiator | Pragmatic Harmonizer |
Courage | Balanced: Stands up for shared principles by applying rules fairly and consistently. Excess: Acts stubbornly or inflexibly, unwilling to adjust even when needed. Deficit: Avoids action out of fear of breaking a rule or stepping out of line. | Balanced: Acts boldly in pursuit of the group’s ethical mission. Excess: Justifies harmful or risky actions in the name of the cause. Deficit: Hesitates or avoids hard choices, waiting for others to act first. | Balanced: Defends fair, inclusive processes even when beliefs differ. Excess: Overthinks or delays decisions to avoid offending anyone. Deficit: Backs down too easily when values come into conflict. | Balanced: Bravely adapts choices to meet complex needs. Excess: Acts too quickly without fully thinking through consequences. Deficit: Hesitates to act, worried about offending or overstepping. |
Wit | Balanced: Clarifies expectations through thoughtful insight. Excess: Uses sharp or critical remarks toward those who question the rules. Deficit: Avoids using humor or insight, sticking rigidly to the script. | Balanced: Motivates others with humor or creativity in service of the mission. Excess: Uses wit to mock or shame those who disagree. Deficit: Misses chances to inspire through insight or humor. | Balanced: Builds bridges with humor while keeping processes fair. Excess: Overcomplicates issues in trying to satisfy everyone. Deficit: Stays silent or avoids fresh ideas to avoid upsetting the balance. | Balanced: Finds inventive ways to bring people together for a greater good. Excess: Justifies cutting corners by being too clever. Deficit: Fails to adapt or offer creative solutions, playing it too safe. |
Pride | Balanced: Feels proud of consistently upholding moral standards. Excess: Acts self-righteously, convinced of moral superiority. Deficit: Downplays personal contributions, overly modest. | Balanced: Takes healthy pride in serving a shared ethical purpose. Excess: Acts arrogantly, believing the cause justifies any action. Deficit: Minimizes own role in achieving group success. | Balanced: Values their role in upholding inclusive, respectful practices. Excess: Becomes defensive when fairness is questioned. Deficit: Fails to recognize or own their positive contributions. | Balanced: Proud of creatively helping diverse needs come together. Excess: Overestimates their role as a fixer or hero. Deficit: Fails to see value in their own flexibility or problem-solving worth. |
Magnanimity | Balanced: Freely gives effort to uphold shared rules and responsibilities. Excess: Gives too much to the system, neglecting individual needs or burning out. Deficit: Holds back effort unless everything fits the standard process. | Balanced: Eager to give time and energy to support a shared goal. Excess: Overextends personally, trying too hard to prove loyalty. Deficit: Waits for others to step up before contributing. | Balanced: Offers help generously to ensure fairness for all. Excess: Stretches too far trying to meet every need perfectly. Deficit: Avoids helping when fairness feels too messy or complex. | Balanced: Offers flexible support to help all sides. Excess: Spreads self too thin trying to help everyone at once. Deficit: Holds back, afraid to step in or interfere. |
Friendliness | Balanced: Welcomes others with steady fairness and respect. Excess: Acts overly formal, creating emotional distance in the name of fairness. Deficit: Appears cold or uncaring by focusing only on rules. | Balanced: Connects with others by rallying around a common cause. Excess: Becomes pushy or overbearing in uniting others. Deficit: Misses chances to connect while focused on the mission. | Balanced: Friendly in honoring varied perspectives while keeping fairness at the center. Excess: Over-accommodates to avoid conflict. Deficit: Keeps distance to avoid showing favoritism. | Balanced: Connects people by focusing on shared values. Excess: Becomes overly familiar or intrusive in trying to please. Deficit: Holds back from connecting out of fear of misstepping. |
Temperance | Balanced: Exercises steady self-control in following agreed processes. Excess: Becomes rigid, unable to adjust when the situation calls for it. Deficit: Abandons structure or consistency under stress. | Balanced: Keeps a steady hand while pushing for shared goals. Excess: Pushes too hard, crossing limits in pursuit of the mission. Deficit: Lacks follow-through, giving up too soon. | Balanced: Keeps a steady, fair approach even amid diverse needs. Excess: Becomes too cautious, slowing decisions down. Deficit: Lets process slide to avoid tension or conflict. | Balanced: Changes course thoughtfully to meet real needs. Excess: Too quick to change or bend, losing stability. Deficit: Hesitates to adapt, clinging to what feels safe or familiar. |
How to Use This Chart in Practice
This chart isn’t just for reflection — it’s a tool to help you notice, adjust, and strengthen how integrity shapes your daily practice. Here are some ways you can use it:
Self-assessment: When facing a challenging situation, locate where your response fits within a quadrant. Ask yourself: Am I leaning too far toward rigidity, accommodation, or another imbalance? Am I acting from integrity or from convenience or fear? This can help you realign your choices with your core values.
Planning and decision-making: Use the chart as a guide when preparing lessons, setting classroom norms, or collaborating on school initiatives. Think about how integrity will shape your approach — are you prioritizing process, outcome, unity, or diversity, and is that the best fit for the situation?
Team reflection: In staff meetings or team discussions, use the chart to explore different perspectives. Invite colleagues to identify which quadrant they lean toward and discuss how your group might achieve a healthier balance together.
Growth tracking: Over time, revisit the chart to reflect on patterns. Where do you feel most comfortable? Where might you stretch yourself? This helps ensure your integrity continues to guide your practice as circumstances change.
In short, aligning these ranges of behaviors (i.e. virtues and vices) to Integrity as a Core Value offers a mirror as much as a map that can help you see where you are and where you might want to go as you strive to live out integrity in ways that support your virtues and avoid their inherent pitfalls.
Moral Maturity: Preference, Discernment, and Integrity in Action
It can be tempting to think that moral maturity means being able to shift between quadrants and adapting our sense of integrity to fit any and every situation. But true moral maturity is not about fluid movement across quadrants. It is about having a clear moral compass often grounded in an intentional preference or alignment with one quadrant that reflects our deeply held ethical orientation. A person of integrity understands that while most situations are best addressed through the ethical approach they most deeply identify with, certain circumstances demand that we act from a particular quadrant in order to uphold integrity in that moment.
For example, an educator might find that they default in most situations toward the Ethical Negotiator quadrant, valuing consistent process and sensitivity to diverse viewpoints. This educator might design class expectations that balance school policy with cultural inclusiveness specific to their students. Yet, when a serious safety issue arises such as an urgent need to evacuate students during a threat, that same educator might recognize that integrity demands the clarity and rule-based action of the Principled Conformist quadrant, where following established safety procedures exactly as written becomes morally essential.
Likewise, a school leader who defaults most often to the Mission-Aligned Loyalist quadrant may typically be open to achieving shared moral goals involving equity in educational outcomes, even if it means adjusting procedures to meet those ends. But in a situation involving legal compliance, such as mandated reporting of abuse, that leader may see that the integrity of the process itself (reporting exactly as required, without reinterpretation or delay due to contextual circumstances) is what defines what is right in that situation.
On the other hand, situations that demand flexibility for the sake of the greater good such as responding to a natural disaster that disrupts normal operations might call for the integrity of the Pragmatic Harmonizer, where adapting both method and goal to protect students’ well-being is the ethical path. In such situations, those who strictly abide by the Principled Conformist quadrant may overlook the greater good for the sake of compliance.
This is where we find the value in recognizing that moral maturity lies in knowing when to stand firm in your preferred quadrant, and when a situation truly calls for the unique demands of a different quadrant, not out of convenience, fear, or external pressure, but out of genuine moral discernment rooted in a grounded understanding of integrity and its purpose.
Modeling and Communicating Moral Maturity for Whole-Child Development
Developing a deeper sense of integrity and moral maturity isn’t just an exercise to be scheduled once a week. It’s something we must actively model and communicate for our students (as much as for each other) if we hope to prepare them for the complexities of the real world. At the heart of this effort is how we help students recognize, understand, and practice the six core virtues and how we guide them to avoid the distortions of these virtues that can become vices of excess or deficiency.
Young people often hear about integrity in abstract terms, but they genuinely learn it by seeing and experiencing what integrity looks like in action with adults demonstrating virtue and navigating vice. This means educators and school leaders have a responsibility to implicitly model and explicitly communicate behaviors that reflect both moral integrity and the balanced expression of these virtues.
When students see adults stand firm with principled courage when safety is at stake (Principled Conformist), adapt with magnanimity to serve shared goals (Mission-Aligned Loyalist), uphold fairness with friendliness and respect for differences (Ethical Negotiator), or apply wit and temperance to adjust goals and methods for a greater good (Pragmatic Harmonizer), they witness integrity as it truly functions in life — and see how virtues stay in balance, rather than tipping into vices.
Communicating this moral maturity requires more than explaining rules or consequences. It means helping students see the why behind decisions, the values and virtues guiding those choices, and the reasoning behind when certain approaches are most appropriate. By doing so, we help students understand that integrity and virtue in the real world are not simplistic or one-size-fits-all. Instead, they require reflection, discernment, and purpose.
This kind of modeling and communication is essential to whole-child development, equipping young people not just to follow rules, but to think ethically, act with moral purpose, balance virtues wisely, and navigate complex situations with clarity and confidence as they develop with integrity.
Final Thought
Integrity is not about perfection. It's not just choosing one path for every situation. It’s about staying anchored to a core understanding of what is right while thoughtfully navigating the real, often messy, choices that come with teaching, leading, and building community.
Remember that the strength of our integrity lies not in clinging rigidly to one way of acting but in our ability to reflect, adjust, and act with purpose, whether that means upholding shared standards, adapting for the greater good, honoring diverse beliefs, or ensuring fairness through clear processes. As you move through different situations and sometimes shift between quadrants, what matters most is that our choices are grounded in a sincere effort to do what’s right, even when no one is looking. In this way, integrity helps our virtues shine and keeps us from slipping into the vices that can distort the best of intentions.
Greg Mullen
June 30, 2025
