Good Governance and Integrity: Academic Institution Perspective

Abstract

Integrity is one of the moral principles related to moral uprightness. Recently, there are a lot of issues discussed regarding the integrity in public sector administration especially in public sector.  Currently governance in public administration has been exposed to public criticism due to the governance failure, fraud, corruption and poor internal control.  The purpose of the study is to examine the relationship between factors of good governance and the practice of integrity in academic institution.  The factors of good governance include ethical leadership, financial resources and asset management.  The study was carried out by using questionnaire and simple random sampling was chosen. The questionnaire survey was distributed to 98 academics from two academic institutions in Malaysia. Such sample was chosen since this study was focused on the academic’s perspective on integrity practice in academic institutions and none of the research has been done in term of good governance and integrity in academic institutions Malaysia. This study found that all three factors of good governance which are ethical leadership, financial resources and asset management have significant relationship on integrity practice in academic institution. The findings of this study can assist academic institutions in Malaysia to improve their governance system and also code of ethics in their organization.  In order to improve future studies, it is recommended that the data collection made to be more extensive. This can help in observing the variation of practice of good governance and integrity in academic institutions.