What is Virtues

Managers should be assessing their employees to ensure that they are recruiting the best talent as well as developing their existing talent. Organizations should be looking at learning and talent development (LTD) as a ‘strategic tool’ that will impact on the performance of their employees, their development, blending cognitive with personal attributes to enhance their overall virtues. In their daily organizational routines, professional individuals should behave with integrity, honesty, earnestness and have a deep feeling of consciousness and respect for others. They should favor common good, equity and stimulate group intelligence. In addition, individuals should strive to understand so that they can be understood - this being one of the secrets of successful organizations which are imbued with a climate of social respect, tolerance and sociability, kindness and friendliness.

The catalog of specific traits that make up character; Aristotle (1941) identified virtues through his Doctrine of the Mean, in which the virtue is the mean or middle between two related extremes. Examples: courage is the mean between cowardice and rashness; honesty is the mean between dishonesty and rudeness/bluntness.

The objective of the classification of personal virtues and character strengths (VIA) is not to correct weaknesses but to focus on those personal resources that enable us to achieve well-being and success. In this direction, they are defined as those morally valued core character traits that have been and are universally present, have their roots in biology and have been evolutionarily selected. There are six in the VIA model, i.e., wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence.

The broad pillars which play an important role in the development of a good character are referred to as virtues in positive psychology.