Can Human Goodness be Used as an Effective Variable in Organizational Studies? Preliminary Analysis of Data from Round 3 of the High Performance Manufacturing Project

Abstract

This paper examines whether human goodness can be used as a variable in organizational studies. The High Performance Manufacturing (HPM) project (round 3) collected data on human goodness, although almost no academic research has utilized it empirically so far. This paper aims to clarify the essence of this human goodness by scrutinizing the contents of the questions and analyzing the data empirically. It argues that data on human goodness was collected not as an objective nature of human beings, but as a perception of the group the respondents belong to, and the possibility of its utilization is wider than expected. Further, this paper also discusses the importance of examining the relationship between human goodness and other individual or organizational variables.