I think it often comes down to: do your actions match your words? In the instance above, when said exec joined our leadership team, he was well aware of the standard of conduct we expected, he agreed to them with his words, in fact. Then, his actions did not match those words, when that is true, where else? In society more generally I think this is true, there are people who we strongly expect that to be true and there are people who we know that isn't true and on some siding scale we accept it (I didn't say acceptable), for example Fox News or CNN, marketing people, and to some degree apparently Elon Musk (in that people who matter to his success appear to believe they know where they stand with him). I don't think this is an American thing or a European thing or anything like that, my understanding is this is a pretty human thing generally?

*Everything on a spectrum.