Muel Kaptein

Muel Kaptein is Equity Partner at the international assurance and advisory firm KPMG and a professor in Business Ethics and Integrity Management at RSM Erasmus University. He has been active as an auditor, a consultant, teacher and researcher in the fields of ethics, integri-ty, sustainability and soft-controls since 1991.

Purpose

Muel believes that ethics makes a positive difference in the lives of people and the perfor-mance of organizations. His purpose is to help organizations improve their ethics, in terms of both culture and policies and both their current constituents (managers and employees) and future constituents (students). For Muel, defining and measuring ethics makes ethics man-ageable and improvable.

Education

Muel studied business administration between 1987 and 1991. During his internship at the Dutch employers association NCW, he wrote a widely distributed booklet on the content, im-plementation and value of business codes of ethics. He coined the phrase “A code is noth-ing, coding is everything.” In 1992, he received the Dr De Jong award for the best Dutch master thesis in management.

Academic positions

In 1991, Muel started as an assistant professor in Business Ethics at the RSM Erasmus Uni-versity. He then lectured on Business Ethics, Strategy & Ethics and Corporate Social Re-sponsibility. In 1998, Muel received his PhD for his study on ethics management, wherein he developed a model to measure and improve the ethical content of organizations. He was su-pervised by Cees Veerman and Eduard Kimman. In 2002, Muel was appointed professor in Business Ethics and Integrity Management at the RSM Erasmus University. At the age of 32, he became one of the youngest full professors in The Netherlands.

From 2003 to 2007, he was chairman of the Department of Business-Society Management at RSM and member of the general board of RSM. He currently lectures on Leadership, Sus-tainability and Governance, which is a compulsory, third-year course for all students in busi-ness administration. More than 10,000 students have participated in his classes so far.

Consulting and auditing

In the early nineties, Muel and his academic colleague Johan Wempe assisted the first organ-izations that pioneered in the field of integrity — the Dutch police, Airport Schiphol and the Ministry of Justice. As their consulting activities became successful, they moved in 1996 part-time to KPMG to found KPMG Integrity —the first consultancy service in this field among the Big-6 in the world.

Since then, Muel and his team have assisted many clients. He has, for example, developed codes of conduct for more than fifty organizations. He also helped Shell in making its first sustainability reports in 1997–99. He has especially helped clients that were confronted with incidents such as fraud, corruption and market abuse, seeking to restore their trustworthi-ness. Muel also became a soft-controls auditor. In 2010, he was the first person to integrate soft controls in the financial statement audit, which was at ABN AMRO Bank, followed by many other organizations.

Innovations

Muel has developed different tools and methods to develop and measure the ethics and in-tegrity of organizations. For example, as part of his PhD thesis, he developed a question-naire to measure the ethical content of organizations, named the - Integrity Thermometer, which has been used by many organizations around the world and is also used to assess the business ethics within countries, such as within the US in 1999, 2004, 2008 and 2013. His model of the ethical culture of organizations has been adopted by the Dutch Central Bank in 2010. His model of The Diamond of Managerial Integrity (2003) has also been widely used to assess the integrity of individuals. Other tools co-developed by him are the ethics game Cards on the Table (1991) and The Dilemma App (2014).

Research

Muel wrote seven books, namely “Ethics Management” (Springer, 1998), “The Balanced Com-pany” (Oxford University Press, 2002), “The Six Principles of Managing with Integrity” (Articu-late Press, 2005), “The Living Code” (Greenleaf, 2008), “Workplace Morality” (Emerald, 2013), “The Servant of the People” (2014), and “Ethicisms and their risks” (2018). The Dutch book “Why Good People Sometimes Do Bad Things” is in its 10th edition. In 2003, he co-edited the Dutch book “Business and Society” with the then prime minister of The Netherlands, Jan-Peter Balkenende. He has published about 40 peer-reviewed articles in international journals such as Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Organization Studies, Journal of Management, Human Relations and Academy of Management Review. Some of his research topics include virtue ethics, corporate ethical culture, whistleblowing, ethics programs and ascriptions of responsibility. His recent papers are about ethics as struggle, ethics leadership, how companies become too ethical and when the appearance of unethical behavior is unethical. Most of his publications can be downloaded from: www.researchgate.net/profile/Muel_Kaptein. In 2007, Muel received the ERIM Best Paper Award.

In 2013, he initiated a PhD research programme on Modern Supervision with nine participants from different regulators and on The Future of Business Ethics in 2015, with 11 participants. He successfully supervised the PhD students Niki den Nieuwenboer, Corrie Mazereeuw, and Franziska Zuber.

Some scientific concepts introduced by Muel are ethics management (1998), corporate ethi-cal virtues model (1998, 2011), corporate integrity theory (2002), autonomy model of respon-sibility (2002, 2015), integrity diamond of managerial integrity (2003), ethics safety net (2003), scale for unethical behaviour (2008), struggle theory (2014), and leadership in ethics (2016).