Ever met someone you knew you couln't trust and don't know why? It's probably that their behaviour is incongruent with their core values. They are trying to be someone else. If you are a liar and always lie and you show people that you are a liar that is actually more congruent than someone who is a liar and pretends not to be. If you are a cheat and OK with being a cheat then people will expect you to cheat and there is some congruency there.
Not that lieing and cheating are by any means good virtues to have but it's the cover up rather than the act that hurts people more.
Integrity means being aligned with your core values and behaving in a way that demonstrates that. It means owning up to your mistakes and rectifying - putting right anything you have done wrong. No one cares what you do wrong but everyone cares when you act through ego and cover things up.
I own a real estate agency in South Australia and one of the things we do is employ cleaners to clean properties between tenants. One of our cleaners missed a lot of areas including cobwebs hanging off the air conditioning vents in the ceiling in one of the properties. When our property manager met him down there to show him the missed areas and ask him to re-clean, her replies with "no we did not miss the air conditioning vents, they were all taken down and cleaned and the spiders came back overnight and put more there"Really?? Really dude?
We did not care that they missed them - it happens, we did care that they did not want to take responsibility and put things right.
