While the world is laser focused this week on the wild ride on the American stock markets, we’re being reminded by a team of researchers at Grand Valley State University that it isn’t always about the money. In fact, in the opening salvo of their recent ranking of Michigan’s largest publicly-held companies they remind us of that fact by quoting the late philosopher and business consultant Robert Solomon who once wrote the “currency of the business world isn’t money; it is trust and trustworthiness.”
Against that backdrop, there’s undoubtedly a fair measure of pride at Whirlpool’s global headquarters in Benton Harbor now that the Grand Valley research pegs Whirlpool Corporation at the very top of Michigan’s Trustworthiness Index.
Authors Michael DeWilde who is Director of the Koeze Business Ethics Initiative at Grand Valley’s Seidman College of Business and Professor of Management there…Kevin Lehnert, Associate Professor of Marketing…Vijay Godhalekar, Professor of Finance and Arik Aninos, a Graduate Research Assistant, argue that trustworthiness is the “one indispensable ingredient required for businesses to run with any efficiency at all.”
The quartet from the Grand Rapids school have created an index “that would measure, to the degree we thought possible given the resources available, how trustworthy 18 of Michigan’s largest publicly-held companies are.”
They say they did it at the urging of an industry partner, “Because large businesses are exemplars and have an outsized effect on workers, communities, and our state.”
They studied financial and environmental stewardship of the companies involved, the treatment of workers, attitudes toward inclusion and diversity, philanthropy, and “a number of other elements integral to the establishment of trustworthiness.” The result is the Michigan Trustworthiness Index, and Whirlpool outstrips every other company reviewed including such corporate giants as For Motor Company, Steelcase, Kellogg, GM, and Dow Chemical among others.
On a five-point scale Whirlpool scored 4.1, with Ford Motor Company second at 3.9, Kellogg at 3.4, down to Visteon who finished at the bottom of the rankings with a 1.3 score.
The authors examined and analyzed companies’ performances in five major categories including:
- Treatment of Stakeholders
- Branding & Reputation
- Leadership & Governance
- Ethics & Values
- Financial Strength
They also make a point of noting, “We do not intend to imply that those companies who scored low in the rankings are then by definition in any absolute terms untrustworthy; it simply means they did not score as high in comparison to the others we considered. By the same token, a higher score does not mean that those companies are definitively trustworthy, only that their efforts to be trustworthy are paying some dividends.”
Here are the rankings from the GVSU report:
Michigan Trustworthiness Index
1. Whirlpool Corporation of Benton Harbor: 4.1 score
2. Ford Motor Company of Dearborn: 3.9 score
3. Stryker Corporation of Kalamazoo: 3.6 score
4. Steelcase of Grand Rapids: 3.6 score
5. Kellogg Company of Battle Creek: 3.4 score
6. CMS Energy Corporation of Jackson: 3.4 score
7. DTE Energy of Detroit: 3.3 score
8. General Motors of Detroit: 3.1 score
9. Ally Financial of Detroit: 3.0 score
10. Universal Forest Products of Grand Rapids: 3.0 score
11. Dow Chemical Company of Midland: 2.9 score
12. Kelly Services of Troy: 2.9 score
13. Lear Corporation of Southfield: 2.8 score
14. Penske Corporation of Bloomfield Hills: 2.5 score
15. American Axle & Manufacturing of Detroit: 2.5 score
16. Wolverine Worldwide of Rockford: 2.5 score
17. SpartanNash Company of Grand Rapids: 2.4 score
18. Visteon Corporation of Van Buren Township: 1.3 score
To read the entire report, you can click the link below:
