Why honesty and humility matters for the business1 min read

A recent meta-analysis (Youngduk Lee et al., 2019) tells us that a presence of such personality trait as Honesty-Humility is strongly negatively (-0.44) correlated with the occurrence of counterproductive work behaviour (tardiness, stealing, withholding knowledge, sabotage, harassment, intentional lowering of the quality of work, etc.) but positively, though not strongly (0.13) with the occurrence of civil behaviour in the organisation (when an employee does something that is not part of his/her instructions, has no explicit reward, but is for the benefit of the organisation)

“Great, we should hire people like that,” aspiring managers will say. And they will be right. Executives with some experience will say: “We need to talk about these values even before hiring so it will attract such kind of people to our company”. And they’ll be right. Well, and very experienced leaders will say that you need to do all this, but the main thing is to set an example that these values are really valued in the organisation, and are not just words and slogans on the walls, i.e. reward such people, promote such people and fire not such people. Make sure that the stories about the company that co-workers tell each other, their family and friends are about such employees.

Source: The importance of being humble: A meta-analysis and incremental validity analysis of the relationship between honesty-humility and job performance, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31192647/

Leave a Reply