Organizational Honesty Values In Non-state Owned Manufacture Enterprises: A Theoretical And Empirical Study

Honesty is a kind of virtue, which should be emphasized by individual and organization. But it has been often ignored by operaters and manager to seek for profits. For example, the affairs on mooncakes with stale stuffing and Sanlu about milk contamination in home, financial cheat scandals from the energy giant Enron and the telecommunications giant Worldcom in the U. S. and the global economic crisis triggered by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae early in 2009 have been to some extent led by lack of honesty.The theoretical researches on enterprises honesty did not appeared until the early 1980s and began to be hot in 1990s and in the late 1990s organizational honesty was studied from the point of view of organizational values and the value-based management. Values are important for enterprise to consistently stick to honesty. Therefore, the study on enterprise honesty values should provide the necessary theoretical basis for enterprise management practices. However, on enterprise honesty values more studies discussed theoretically than tested empirically and no studies tested empirically the content structure of enterprise honesty values and explored the efficiency of enterprise honesty values on both individual and organizational levels.Although non-state owned manufacture enterprises have played important roles in civil economic structure, researches on honesty values in non-state owned manufacture enterprises in Chinese culture background are still in nascent stages, which may be one of reasons that the life-spans of civil non-state owned manufacture enterprises are shorter than that in the U. S. or Japan. Therefore, the present study theoretically and empirically analyzed the honesty values in non-state owned manufacture enterprises in China The results were hoped to be helpful for study on organizational behaviors in China and contribute to constructing honesty values in Chinese enterprises and better developing socialistic market economy in China..A series of poly-element researching methods and statistical techniques including interview, questionnaire investigation, factor analysis, structural equation model been employed in the study, the definition and structure of the enterprise honesty values have been presented, and the features of the enterprise honesty values basing on statistics variables of individual and organization and the influence of the enterprise honesty values on the organizational effectiveness from individual and organizational level were explored. The conclusions were made as follows:(a) With an advance questionnaire administrated on 192 employees, an exploratory factor analysis of the data from 512 employees and confirmatory factor analysis of the data from 446 employees, the results showed that the enterprise honesty values in non-state owned manufacture enterprises included 4 factors: organizational honesty, colleague honesty, system honesty and superior-subordinate honesty. The Organizational Honesty values Scale had high reliability and validity, which could be used as the measurement tool for enterprise honesty values.(b)A survey on 527 employees from non-state owned manufacture enterprises showed that demographic variables had a less influence on enterprise honesty values. Age had influence on the superior-subordinate honesty of the enterprise honesty values significantly and the enterprise members who are younger than 25 perceived more superior-subordinate honesty than those whose above 25. Length of service had significant influence on the colleague honesty and the members who have worked for more than 10 years perceived more colleague honesty than those who have worked for 1 to 5 years.(c)There was a significant discrepancy in enterprise honesty values in different sizes of enterprise. In organizational honesty of enterprise honesty values, small enterprises scored higher than big and moderate-size enterprises. In colleague honesty, big enterprises scored higher moderate-size and small enterprises. In system honesty, big and small enterprises scored higher moderate-size enterprises. In superior-subordinate honesty, small enterprises scored higher moderate-size enterprises.(d)Organizational and superior-subordinate honesty of enterprise honesty values had a significant positive prediction of job satisfaction. Organizational, colleague and superior-subordinate honesty had a significant positive prediction of organizational commitment. Organizational, colleague and system honesty had a significant negative prediction of intention to quit. (e) There were significant correlations between organizational effectiveness on organizational level and organizational, colleague, system honesty of enterprise honesty values. Colleague honesty had a significant positive prediction of organizational effectiveness on organizational level.The innovation in the study is that the study expanded the field of study on the organizational honesty values, systematically inspected the structure and the characters of the organizational honesty values using a variety of methods from different angle, constructed the structure model of the organizational honesty values in non-state owned manufacture enterprises suitable for Chinese culture background and explored the efficiency of enterprise honesty values on both individual and organizational levels.