Honesty May Not Be The Best Policy

According to an anthropologist, Chris Jenks, culture is formed from the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. Culture is “the body of belief, behavior, knowledge…values, and goals that make up the way of life…” (Hatch, p. 204). Values are principles and standards held within a culture to have intrinsic worth. It constitutes the basis for making judgments about what is right and what is wrong, which is why they are also referred to as a moral or ethic code (Hatch, p. 214). However, the article that I stumbled in this month, “Corporate Culture Encourages Lying” from www.management-issues.com showed that not all businesses follow these values.

The article discusses how Britain’s employees feel they are obliged to lie due to lack of information and support they need to do their jobs properly. Not only the employees are lying to their customers, but also lies get passed up an organization’s hierarchy. One in five employees would lie to their boss or their colleagues. The Aziz Management Communications Index shows that company directors and managers believe it is wrong for their employees to lie to them. However, almost half are comfortable with those same employees telling untruths on their behalf to their customers (Corporate, p. 1).

Honesty may be not the best policy from a business point of view, because often times managers or even employees themselves give misinformation or not adequate information, in order, to gain power and control of each other. Lying is a form of mechanism of control. Nonetheless, managers should encourage amongst their staff to be honest with each other and also to their customers. Otherwise, customers who discover that they have been lied to will not return and the business's reputation is difficult to recover. This idea may be applied to librarianship, because if a librarian gives inaccurate information to a patron’s information need, he or she would not want to utilize the library after that.

In conclusion, oftentimes businesses feel they don’t have other options except to lie. They are often misleading their customers because they find themselves in an “expectation trap”. The customers will not do business with them unless they appear to be successful, yet they can’t be successful until people do business with them.

~Anne Tran~