Ethical Practice is the second competency in the Leadership cluster. This unit is pure structure: three sub-competencies, one definition sentence, and one short list of key concepts.
The three sub-competencies
Personal Integrity, Professional Integrity, and Ethical Agent. Three, not four.
- Personal Integrity — integrity in one's own personal relationships and behaviors.
- Professional Integrity — integrity in professional relationships and behaviors.
- Ethical Agent — cultivating the organization's ethical environment and ensuring policies and practices reflect ethical values.
Watch the substitutions. Transparency and accountability appear in the key concepts and the definition but are not sub-competencies. Conflicts of interest is a key concept, not a sub-competency. Professional Responsibility and Ethical Leadership are principles of the SHRM Code of Ethics, not BASK sub-competencies.
The definition
Ethical Practice is the KSAOs needed to maintain high levels of personal and professional integrity and to act as an ethical agent who promotes core values, integrity, and accountability throughout the organization.
Not compliance, transparency, and profitability. Not fairness, diversity, and belonging, which is Inclusive Mindset language. Not confidentiality, anonymity, and consent, which are privacy concepts listed elsewhere in the same competency.
Personal versus Professional Integrity
An HR generalist who misrepresents her own certification status on an internal promotion application implicates Personal Integrity: it is her own conduct, not the organization's ethical environment and not policy design.
Ethical Agent is about building the environment. Professional Integrity covers professional relationships and behaviors, not "the design of company policy" alone.
Ethical business principles and practices
The BASK names transparency, authenticity, and conflicts of interest. Sustainability and shareholder primacy are governance and CSR concepts, not this list. Confidentiality belongs to the separate privacy grouping.