While a survey of executives shows companies place ethics and integrity among their top five corporate values, the same executives say they're observing office behaviors that fly in the face of corporate mission statements.

With news unfolding this week about massive accounting fraud at WorldCom and an overstatement of profits at Supervalu, the American Management Association released a survey it conducted in spring among upper-middle and senior-level executives.

Among the findings:

• While 76 percent of the 175 respondents said ethics/integrity ranked among their top core values, about one-third said their companies' public statements sometimes conflict with internal messages and realities.
  
  
• The majority of respondents said customer satisfaction is their No. 1 corporate value. Others in the top five are accountability, respect for others and open communication.
  
  
• Thirty-six percent said their organizations would always do what's legal but not always what could be perceived as ethical.
  
  
• A significant portion are noticing behaviors that conflict with stated corporate values: micromanagement (70 percent), hidden agendas (56 percent), dissension in senior management ranks (58 percent) and failure to give proper credit (59 percent).

This was the first time the 750,000-member organization conducted a survey on corporate values and practices, said spokeswoman Florence Stone, who has worked with executives for 30 years.

"We did this right after the Enron incident because we were curious to find out how values are really being practiced in today's corporations,'' said Stone, adding that Enron's stated values included honesty and integrity. "Clearly what we're seeing (from the survey) is that values are not being translated into behaviors by senior management or embedded in organizations so people get rewarded for them.''

The association plans to further investigate how companies communicate their values and could develop a training program based on those results, she said.

The key to lining up behavior with corporate values is leadership, said Ron James, president and chief executive of the 24-year-old Center for Ethical Business Cultures in Minneapolis.

James, a former chief executive of US West in Minnesota, said another survey showed that when leaders "model ethical behavior" only 24 percent of workers observed unethical behavior in the workplace. When leaders don't model and reinforce ethical behavior, "that number jumps to 73 percent,'' said James, citing a study by the Ethics Resource Center in Washington, D.C.

"The message here is if leaders walk their talk, set examples, lead by doing, there's a much lower incidence of unethical behavior,'' he said.

The local nonprofit center's partners are the University of St. Thomas College of Business and the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.

The challenge in creating ethical business cultures, James said, is balancing short-term pressures required by Wall Street with long-term benefits for all stakeholders, including investors, employees, customers and communities.

"We have to be careful not to paint all companies with the same brush, because there are some companies trying to do the right things,'' said James. "They are making the decisions to behave ethically even when it costs in the short term because they know in the long term it pays off.''

James said ethical behavior pays off in improved relationships with communities and customers, in repeat customers and in retention of employees who can be expensive to recruit and train.

The center is receiving more requests for advice on preventing ethical lapses and what to do when they occur, James said.

"Clearly there's motivation now to step back and look at their own practices, procedures and policies, and to do self-analysis,'' he said. "I think it's a great opportunity for self-examination and self-correction.''