Your Superior is More Honest than You

I like to think that in this point in my career I have worked for some pretty dishonest people. Corporate America has never struck me as a bastion of honesty. Then again, during college, I worked for the CEO of a non-profit who I heard years later was fired for stealing money from the pithy coffers of the organization.

Thus, I was quite surprised to read in this article by Harvard Business Review contributors Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman that according to their study, my superiors are at least perceived by others in my organization to be, on average, more honest than me.

This in itself is a happy conclusion. If I work for an organization, or invest in a company, I want the leaders to be honest. Honesty, I assume, will on average result in higher overall returns over time. Sure if I had invested my money with Bernie, my returns would have been great in the short term…but over a longer term, well.

The most fascinating thing in this article was superiors’ perceptions of their direct reports. Zenger and Folkman reveal something quite different than I would expect:

But in reality, managers tend to give their direct reports higher marks for honesty and integrity than those individuals get from their peers — and than they give themselves.

In other words, managers consistently overrate their direct reports' honesty and integrity. And (as you can see from the graph) the more effective an individual is as a leader, the worse this gets. So just as being honest matters more and more, individuals are given more and more of the benefit of the doubt.

The more effective a peon is, the higher their level of integrity is viewed by their superiors. This would seem to translate in most jobs to mean that the people receiving promotions, or the future leaders of the organization, are perceived by the current leaders of the organization to be more honest than they actually are.

It’s hard to say definitively from the information given in the article, but it seems that if this phenomenon is true over time, that employers need to work harder to evaluate honesty and integrity as part of the promotion process.