The myth of collectively held "core values."

How painful is it for employees to endure the spectacle of publicly paraded "our values" text on their corporate web sites? Perhaps an internal questionnaire would provide sufficient evidence to challenge the validity of the assertion in the heading or to endorse it.

Usefully, core value statements of a company prescribe its attitude, behaviour and character. Further, beliefs rooted in ideology or cultural values are quite "sticky" - they resist disconfirming evidence and persist in affecting judgements and choice, regardless or not whether they are true (1)

"Value systems" became the rage in the early 1980's and found a place within the construct of the "Vision of the firm." The significance of corporate culture in Japanese management became recognised as a driver of performance. We also had the McKinsey 7-S Framework. This included "Shared values" or "Superordinate goals" as a central, soft variable for analysing performance. To fit the Framework, these values had to be shared by most people in an organization.

But the cracks showed even then. A distinction was made between corporate culture and climate, where the latter really measures the fit between the prevailing culture and individual values of the employee. (Figure 1). If the employees had adopted the values of the prevailing culture, the climate was "good." If they had not, the climate was "poor," and motivation and presumably performance suffered. (2)

Figure 1

However, the idea that appropriate values would drive appropriate behaviour and reduce the need for other types of managerial control on employees can be fraught with difficulty in certain organizational situations. (3) For example, the "Values into action" change management technique uses a question-based meeting process to trigger individual as opposed to collective action. (4)

Consequently, a return to basics is overdue when addressing "values." An interesting application of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) examined the success factors driving entrepreneurship and evolved the cascade diagram reformatted in Figure 2. Beliefs and values are intertwined which leads to the conclusion that the former should feature prominently in the world of work, with the taboos imposed by well-meaning but misguided law makers suspended to encourage conversation and learning. This is the subject of further contributions to come.

Figure 2

Abbreviated references:

(1) Pfeffer and Sutton, "Hard facts, dangerous half-truths and total nonesense," HBS, 2006.
(2) Hax and Majluf, "Strategic management - an integrative perspective," Prentice Hall, 1984.
(3) Balogun and Hope Hailey, "Exploring strategic change," Prentice Hall, 2004.
(4) Holman, Devane, Cady, "The change handbook," Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006.

Published on LinkedIn at:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/myth-collectively-held-core-values-david-meggitt?published=t