Different Values Forms in Organization: is the Congruence Possible?

Abstract

The organizations especially actively declaring the importance of values quite often have not even diagnosed this phenomenon in their environment. The organizations often invite external experts, expecting to purify and implement organizational values, but declaration of values and their opposite reflection in the employees' behaviour show that the identified, but unimplemented values of the organization remain only a formal document, a part of the image of the organization that, however, has nothing to do with the general activities of the organization. Different forms of values exist in organizations, but we tend to uniform them, and speak only as about organizational values or values of the organization in a general sense, but no more. The problem is that the different forms arise from different subjects, and the objective is that the congruence would occur between the different forms of values. Therefore, the aim of the current paper is to clarify the concept of values forms in organization and highlight the perspective of these values congruence. Based on the analysis of the different forms of values distinguished in scientific literature, five most frequently encountered and discussed forms of values can be identified: core, espoused, attributed, shared and aspirational. The detailed analysis of forms of values in the organization shows that the congruence of these different forms of values is possible, but the activities of the organization in order to uniform the values must be particularly purposeful and targeted, and the first step is to find out those values. As the congruence occurs when the executives' espoused values match the employees' attributed values, they are shared and they go along with the core cultural values of the organization.