Honesty: A Key Virtue for Business Success
Honesty is one of the most important virtues that determines the failure or growth of a business. Honesty is a highly important moral character because it results in other positive attributes, such as integrity, truthfulness, kindness, and discipline. Honesty emphasizes the absence of cheating and doing other harmful habits which might harm others. In a business, honesty is a day to day practice whereby managers and employees exhibit truthfulness and transparency among one another. The primary advantage of acknowledging honesty in an organization is because it builds trust, an outcome that is highly critical for the success of a business. The level of trust which employees place on their managers plays a highly significant role in shaping the organizational culture, impacting indirectly the productivity of a business. Additionally, honesty contributes remarkably to establishing reliable workplace behavior and building trust with the customers. This paper focuses on analyzing why honesty is highly important for the success of a business.
Honesty: A Vital Component of Moral Character
Honesty is a part of a moral character that attributes to other positive virtues, including straightforwardness, loyalty, and integrity. Honesty is acknowledged as the best life policy because it brings out other positive qualities, giving people confidence and courage required to handle any kind of a situation. In an organization, honesty makes both employees and managers to have a good health as a result of the absence of worries, stress, and tensions of being detected for the dishonest activity. Honesty keeps organizational members free from stressful life which leads to numerous diseases, such as diabetes and blood pressure (MacDonald, 2010). Honesty workers are usually well respected, cared, loved, and trusted, promoting workers' productivity and submissive within the organization. Honesty develops life's transparency by awakening a person's talents. On this regard, dishonesty people hardly recognize their primary purpose in life because they barely trust in themselves. Therefore, honesty is highly important, not only for the organization's success but also for people's health.
Negative Impacts of Dishonesty in the Workplace
According to McLennan, "60 percent of all the people lie at least once in a conversation of ten minutes, with many of them telling 2 or 3 lies in that time period" (McLennan, 2003). The benefits of upholding honesty in a workplace could be easily examined by reviewing the negative impacts of dishonesty leaders. When leaders disregard the truth or cover a lie, other employees learn that telling the truth is not effectively valued, increasing their probability of lying. Dishonesty negatively impacts organizational ability to attract more investors because of a lack of trust (McLennan, 2003). Researchers acknowledge that some investors are very good at sensing lies compared to others. When stakeholders and other business associates detect insincerity and lack of honesty, they may take it as a warning of not doing business with the company.
Honesty and Trust: Building Strong Relationships with Employees and Customers
Honesty is highly important in building trusts with both the employees and the consumers. When a manager or an employee does a mistake on a customer and accepts it, the probability is remarkably high that the client will appreciate the honesty behavior and forgive the previous mistakes. Additionally, the client might acknowledge the manager's or employee's honesty as highly refreshing, trusting the organization in doing further businesses. However, when the client discovers the managers or employee's dishonesty, the chances of transacting further with the organization are extensively minimal. Honesty helps in building a positive reputation for both the organization and managers in the general community. According to McLennan, "More than 80 percent of all consumers, both B2B and B2C products check out companies online before doing business with them" (McLennan, 2003). An honest reputation promotes businesses' productivity by attracting fresh clients who are looking for trustworthy business associates. Honesty improves both workers and managers mental health because lying cause stressful emotions because of the tendency of lying to cover up the previous lies. Therefore, honesty results in remarkably positive impacts on all aspects of life, both for the organization's success and the people.
Honesty and Leadership: Fostering Trustworthy and Reliable Leaders
Honesty is highly effective in building a trustworthy and reliable leadership in an organization. Effective leadership is based on honesty which promotes commitment to both the organization and the customers. Honesty is remarkably essential in leadership because employees prefer to follow leaders who lead with integrity and the ones they could trust. Moral leadership is extremely strategic hence it influences the success and failure of a business in attaining long-term goals. Honesty leaders are highly valued in an organization because, dishonesty results to other negative impacts, such as corruption. According to Roberts, "In 2014, a survey carried on more than 33,000 respondents discovered that only 22% of people trust business managers to tell the truth, and only 14% trust government agents to tell the truth" (Roberts, 2014). Through honesty, leaders can easily motivate other followers, inspiring them to accomplish a certain goal. Effective leaders usually draft the mission plan, develop the vision regarding the upcoming mission, inspire followers, help and encourage other team members. Effective leaders use their honesty as a remarkable example to inspire other team members. In order to exhibit their honesty, leaders have to prove themselves by upholding the truth and admitting their mistakes in front of others, setting an example of the positive impacts of honesty.
Honesty and Customer Satisfaction: Building Trust and Positive Reputation
According to MacDonald, "the role of business is to offer products and services that make the lives of people better, while utilizing fewer resources, and acting lawfully with integrity" (MacDonald, 2010). The business holds the responsibility of remaining honesty to its customers in order to create long-term values for the society, employees, and the customers. Besides doing the right thing, serving customers with honesty generates their trusts, believing the business will meet the future demands. Additionally, honesty benefits the business through the positive customer's word of mouth, resulting in a highly valuable brand recognition. Honesty also promotes employee's morale by providing them with an environment where they feel proud of working (MacDonald, 2010). Investing in customers satisfaction generates higher profit through customers retention and providing consumers with an additional value. Honesty diminishes customers impatience and promotes understanding. For example, in a restaurant where the client's order is taking longer time than usual, managers need to be honest why the food is delaying in order to open a room for more understanding. Accordingly, honesty motivates customers willingness to offer feedback. When managers exhibit honesty behaviors to the customers, the organization can depend on the clients to acquire honest feedbacks (MacDonald, 2010). Customers' feedback is highly useful in improving and bettering organizations products and services, leading to an increase in profits. Therefore, staying honesty with the customer is highly important because it creates trusts, promotes brand impact, encourages understanding, and creates customers willingness to provide feedback.
Honesty in Financial Reporting: Upholding Accuracy and Ethical Standards
Honesty is considered highly significant in financial reporting for legal, ethical, and financial purposes. A dishonesty financial report that purposely offers misleading information causes stakeholders and other investors to make a major financial decision based on unjustifiable facts. Stakeholders, government agencies, and lenders possess the right to access accurate information when evaluating organizations tax liability or when deciding if the business is worthy of investment (Dontoh, 2013). The top managers are responsible for ensuring that the financial statements reflect the organization's operations effectively. Lenders evaluate the creditworthiness of the organization based on the information provided in the financial statements. When lenders acknowledge the organization is providing inaccurate information, the organization could be held legally responsible, impacting negatively the organization's reputation (Dontoh, 2013). The government agencies calculate the tax liability of the organization based on the information regarded in the financial statements, including, payroll taxes, revenue taxes, and income taxes. Additionally, for the organization to operate proactively, it needs to base its decisions on an accurate financial information regarding how much the organization is making or losing. Managers find it compelling to misrepresent the financial information in order to evade the tax obligation, but computing correctly the financial statements allows an organization to assess all business aspects, making the appropriate changes (Dontoh, 2013). Therefore, besides the tax obligation, honesty bookkeeping promotes the success of a business by enabling easy access to loans and ensuring effective organizations operations.
Honesty in Organizational Practices: Fostering Integrity and Good Leadership
Effective leaders do what they believe is right regardless of the personal agendas. Having integrity emphasizes disregarding personal agendas in order to focus on the greater goal of the organization. In the modern economy, consumers are highly valued and intentionally or unintentionally, a sense of dishonesty negatively affects the organization's reputation. There are numerable ways applicable to incorporating honesty within an organization, including keeping promises and commitments. The effective way of upholding honesty in an organization is by delivering promises without excuses or conditions (Nickel, 2014). For example, when managers promise to attend a certain meeting by a specific time, it is highly effective to keep the promise or provide prior notification in case of other commitments. Another method of incorporating honesty in an organization is by hiring committed employees who surround themselves with honesty people. The people organization employs needs not only to be highly acknowledged in the field but also possessing a great influence to those surrounding them (Nickel, 2014). Exhibiting honesty emphasizes accepting one's mistakes and finding a solution to the problem. Therefore, honesty is not only the best life policy in terms of principle, but It also plays a major role in the success of a business.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Honesty is one of the most important virtues that determines the failure or growth of a business. Honesty is a part of a moral character that attributes to other positive virtues, including straightforwardness, loyalty, and integrity. Honesty with customers is highly important because it creates trusts, promotes brand impact, encourages understanding, and creates customer's willingness to provide feedback. Honesty bookkeeping promotes the success of a business by enabling easy access to loans and ensuring effective organizations operations. Therefore, honesty is not only the best life policy in terms of principle, but it also plays a major role in the success of a business.
References
Dontoh, A. (2013). Financial Statements' Integrity. Abacus, 49(3), 169-307. doi: 10.1111/abac.12012
MacDonald, J. (2010). The Role of Business and Strategies. Performance & Management Review, 33(3), 236-358. doi: 10.2753/pmr1530-9576330307
McLennan, A. (2003). Reputation and Honesty. SSRN Electronic Journal, 56-856. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.422701
Nickel, J. (2014). Building a Foundation of Transparency, Integrity, and Honesty. Association Journal, 8(1-2), 17-39. doi: 10.5489/cuaj.1927
Roberts, S. (2014). A study of Trust Management. Journal Of Trust, 1(11), 15. doi: 10.1186/2196-064x-1-1
