Improving Public Sector Integrity through Action Research

A pro-integrity culture goes beyond policing corruption to build the capabilities and practices of public sector leaders and staff, integrating the protection and enhancement of the public interest into their everyday work. An ANZSOG Research Model project saw us partner with the Victorian Public Sector Commission to sponsor research by experts at the University of Sydney into effective practical changes the public sector can make to foster a pro-integrity culture.

The final report from the project – Improving Public Sector Integrity through Action Research – written by Assel Mussugalova, Susan Goodwin and Alicia Sin, used action research to identify and develop promising examples of integrity-as-practice and pro-integrity interventions in four Victorian government agencies.

The four action research projects were developed from the ground up from within four agencies. Each project was distinctive in scope and focus:

• In order to understand speak up culture across a large and dispersed school workforce, the action research project in the Department of Education elicited school leaders and school staff perspectives to generate insights to inform future resources and policy.

• With the goal of promoting everyday integrity practices, the project run in the Department of Health sought to embed integrity discussions into existing meeting structures across two work areas over a trial period, finding that normalising integrity as an everyday topic shifted how staff understood and engaged with it.

• The action research undertaken by the Department of Justice and Community Safety trialled an integrity risk self-assessment tool with the Sheriff's Office of Victoria, working through integrity risks together in cross-level groups to integrate knowledge and frank reflections.

• In the Department of Transport and Planning, a network of voluntary integrity champions distributed across the organisation was established, with the research finding that peer-based approaches extended the reach of the central integrity team and began to shift integrity from a centralised function to a shared organisational responsibility.

The key lessons emerging from across the four action research projects point to a view of integrity culture as a collective, relational, and adaptive achievement — a culture that cannot be realised through directive or mandate or delivered through training alone. This central finding is that integrity is best understood as a relational practice. Where structured spaces for dialogue were created, participants moved integrity from an abstract compliance requirement to a lived, shared responsibility which was built through everyday interactions, mutual accountability, and collective sense-making.

The projects also clarified an important distinction between systems and culture, and between individual knowledge and collective practice. Systems and processes are not an alternative to culture change, they are its foundation, where they create the conditions of trust and shared understanding from which deeper behavioural and cultural change can follow.

Together, these lessons offer a practical framework for public sector organisations seeking to build pro-integrity cultures that are durable, contextually grounded, and genuinely embedded in the way people work.

An earlier report from the research project can also be found here, which contains a database of promising practices trialled in public sector agencies in other Australian and international jurisdictions

The review provides a framework for categorising the variety of practical actions that are being taken to change public sector practices. This framework, as well as the concrete examples of each category of practice, can assist the sector to identify different approaches for the development of fit-for-purpose interventions.