Values at Work: The Impact of Personal Values in Organisations

Abstract

This paper reviews and integrates past research on personal values in work organisations, seeking to portray the role personal values play in shaping the choices and behaviour of individuals in work settings. We start by addressing the role of values in the occupational choice people make. We then review research on the relationships of personal values to a variety of behaviours at work. We continue with discussing the multiple paths through which managers’ values affect organisations and their members. In the last section, we address the interplay between organisational levels, and discuss the congruency between personal and organisational values and its implications for organisations and their employees. Together, the research reviewed indicates how the broadness and stability of values make them an important predictor of behaviour at various levels of the organisation. We end by discussing directions for future research on values in organisations.

Putting Values into Context

“…Arieli et al () have done an excellent job of summarising the associations between measures of values and a broad variety of organisationally relevant variables. There are two issues that I should like to explore in relation to this work.…”

The Value of Values for Understanding Organizational Life: Editor’s Introduction to the Lead Article

“…They are published together with commentaries by other leading researchers and followed by a response from the lead article authors. The lead article by Arieli, Sagiv, and Roccas (2019) provides a valuable overview of research on personal values in organizations, while the comentaries by Fischer (), Maio, Hanel, Martin, Lee, and Thomas () and Smith () offer insightful reflections for future research.…”

“…Arieli et al (2019) survey the literature on personal values in organizations through the lens of Shalom Schwartz’s Theory of Human Values (Schwartz, ; Schwartz et al, ). They review evidence on how values relate to career choice and vocational interests; to behaviors at work including altruistic behaviors, competition and cooperation, status seeking, creativity/innovation, proactivity, reactions to organizational change and authority.…”

“…They also elaborate on themes of person‐environment, person‐organization and person‐job fit from a values perspective. Arieli et al () offer suggestions for future research including the need to examine mechanisms that relate values to organizational behavior, to explore a person‐centric approach through investigating value profiles, and to be attentive to value change, for example, related to generational cohorts and economic changes.…”

“…Yet how individuals within these organizations achieve such balance is not understood (even though there is some evidence that such balance is possible, Frimer, Walker, Dunlop, Lee, & Riches, ). Research on individual value profiles as called for by Arieli et al () may help to answer this question. Such research should also seek to shed light on the consequences of value‐balancing—for instance, might there be a longer‐term cost to individual’s well‐being because balancing conflicting values requires ongoing psychological effort?…”