Values and their relationship with organizational culture
1. introduction
"The object of education is to form beings capable of governing themselves, and not for being governed by others"
Herbert Spencer
At the present time, given the economic, political and social situation that exists worldwide, the need to improve the competitiveness of companies has become widespread. Cuba is no exception, as an underdeveloped country, it seeks answers more in line with its specific conditions and for this it requires more up-to-date and real approaches.
Naturally, the improvement of business competitiveness is a complex problem, so it needs to be approached in a comprehensive manner, that is, from a perspective that considers all the factors that have to do with its improvement.
From the Japanese success and later from other Asian countries, a questioning of the traditional forms of management that until then had been applied in the developed business world begins, whose genesis is in the studies of Taylor, Mayo and others, criticized old paradigms and other new forms of management are introduced where an important weight is given to the participation of workers in decision-making, to leadership, to the formation of solid values where a vision of the future prevails, considering that Productivity depends essentially two engines: pride in belonging to the company and enthusiasm for work.
If we think about which are the management paradigms that have prevailed in the Cuban business reality (although at the moment a change is taking place in that sense), we find realities such as:
Produce at all costs without taking into account the costs, authoritarianism, traditionalism, lack of training, among others.
Precisely a weak or deficient culture causes stagnation and the decline of companies, bringing with it phenomena such as: job dissatisfaction, staff fluctuation, unproductive companies, among others.
Yvan Allaire and Mihaela E. Firsirotu talk about how success and organizational vitality depend on the development of appropriate cultures and values. We will be talking about the latter.
Many successful organizations, from corporations to nonprofits, schools and government agencies, have initiated attempts to make their values explicit. The elaboration of values plays a decisive role in the development (not only of individuals) but of organizations, and society as a whole.
The present work aims to explain from a conceptual basis the role that values play in the formation and development of organizational culture.
For these reasons we can ask ourselves: What are values really?
Values are essentially priorities based on integrity or choices. They are present in what we do and do not do, in the things we have become accustomed to and what we are capable of tolerating. The values are based on real alternatives and a genuine consideration of their consequences. They are expressed publicly and openly, acted out repeatedly, and defended when they go against personal self-interest.
For Salvador García and Simón. I Dolan «values are relatively stable strategic learning over time that one way of acting is better than its opposite to achieve our goals, or that things turn out well for us».
Values are words. However, there is no doubt that the words that are identified as values have a special power to give meaning and channel human resources, both at the personal level and at the company level.
Values are the creators of integrity and responsibility, they are the forgers of optimism and self-esteem, and of the definitions of who we are. They become manifest and alive through action, even the action of sincere declaration.
When organizations are value-driven, clear on ethical issues, and upheld in integrity, employees are able to make conscious choices, publicly define, and live by their highest values. Unfortunately, a large number of Cuban organizations ignore values, nothing more than in the form of laws, rules and regulations, and without thinking they reduce their values to the lowest common denominator. Others try to impose their values, turning them into morality.
Fundamentally, organizations have a choice between value-driven rules and rule-driven values. They can impose a uniform set of rules and regulations for employees by more or less coercive methods, make them take the back seat in decision-making, and do only what the law requires (what we have discussed above is what happens in a group of Cuban institutions and companies, which does not mean that it is their generality). Or they can encourage employees to develop their own values in dialogue with one another, and work toward higher common ground. Each of these value-creation orientations represents, in itself, a deeper set of values.
Within the values we can distinguish different levels. A "first order" value lies in all the things that are important to us. A "second order" consists of the value of having values, turning inward, and forcing us to consider what is important and why. A "third order" of values consists of acting on values without even being aware of them, so that they become an integral part, inseparable from who we are.
The first order of values in organizations is oriented towards behavior, and is corrective or defensive in purpose. Its purpose is to protect people and organizations from unethical conduct. The second order is oriented toward understanding, and its purpose is often transformational or developmental. It is made to encourage progress, learning, change, improvement and evolution in the conditions under which people work. The third is character oriented, and is integrative or transcendent in purpose. Aim for actions to flow naturally from who we are, rather than what we believe in.
These distinctions are useful in helping people to realize that there is value in having values, and to raise their consciousness so that they naturally live up to their values, and gradually surpass them. Encourage people and organizations to engage in dialogue about the three orders of values and the implementation of values in daily life.
Organizations that create a context of values, ethics and integrity progress from the first to the second and third order of values integrating them into their culture.
2. Ethical values. What are they? Ends or means?
Ethical values are structures of our thought that we keep preconfigured in our brain as a human species in order to survive.
Ethical values are adequate means to achieve our goals. When talking about values it is important to differentiate between the values that we can call final and the instrumental type values. Instrumental values are appropriate or necessary modes of conduct to achieve our existential goals or values.
Studies carried out by Rockeach show that while the number of final values that people usually say they possess is not much more than a ten, the number of instrumental values is higher, although it does not reach a hundred.
There must not necessarily be a punctual correspondence between the final and instrumental values. In addition, to obtain a certain final value, a certain set of several instrumental values may be necessary.
We must bear in mind that when a merely instrumental value is attributed an extraordinary value, it becomes perceived as final by its owner.
Competence Values are other instrumental values, which can be called competence, they are more individual, although they are also socially conditioned and are not directly related to morality or guilt. And it answers the question: what do you think it takes to be able to compete in life?
It is essential to emphasize that no one feels guilty, or even uncomfortable, for not assuming a competitive value, unless this value is shared by a group of people of which we want to be part. That is to say, no one feels guilty for not behaving creatively, unless it corresponds to a reference group.
Final values (existential goals) can be divided into two types: personal and ethical - social.
• Personal values: those to which the individual aspires for himself and answers the question of what is the most important thing in life for you?
• Ethical - social values: they constitute aspirations or purposes that benefit the whole of society. And it answers the question, what do you want for the world? Within the ethical - social values we find:
• Ethical - moral values: refers to the modes of conduct necessary to achieve our final values, and they are not necessarily existential ends. In fact, the word "moral" comes from the Latin mores, which means custom. And it answers the question, how do you think you should behave with those around you?
Moral values are a type of instrumental value that have two essential characteristics:
to. They are put into practice in relationships with other people.
b. In mentally balanced people, when they join but do not translate into consistent behaviors, they tend to generate feelings of guilt or, at least, to annoy oneself.
We must take into account after analyzing the final and instrumental values, that a person may experience conflict between two moral values, between two competence values or between a moral value and a competence value.
Are all values not worth the same?
All the values do not have the same value, since each one has a level of hierarchy and priority according to its relative importance. The importance attributed to the different values is readjusted throughout life according to the experiences, reflections and the social attractions that end up influencing us.
It is difficult to defend that the values held by people, within their own relative priority scale, are some better than others in absolute terms. The classification between final and instrumental values also does not allow such differentiation.
Therefore, the values will have the value that each of the people and organizations is able to give them as well as the priority that they want them to have.
3. Beliefs, Behaviors and their relationship with values
There are three terms of social psychology that are closely related to the values they are: beliefs, norms and attitudes.
And we can ask ourselves: What are beliefs?
Values can be conceived as strategic choices regarding what is convenient to achieve our ends. It is important to understand that these choices come, in turn, from basic assumptions or beliefs about human nature and the world around us. Ultimately, we prefer to think and act in one way or another, depending on how we think people and things are.
Beliefs is the action of believing in the verisimilitude or possibility of a thing.
Beliefs are thought structures, elaborated and ingrained throughout learning, that serve to express reality and that precede the configuration of values (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Sequence between beliefs and results.
The relationship between beliefs and values is strongly close. For this reason, today there is much talk about the change of beliefs and values, rather than the change of values in isolation. The unlearning of beliefs is essential to rethink values, change behaviors and positively influence the results of the company.
In the Cuban company, today these two elements are not combined, belief and values product of the fact that the values that exist in them are not well defined, if we work on them it will help its further development, beliefs are the sustenance of the values.
However, we cannot stop saying that beliefs are not alien to results, just as results are not alien to beliefs. It is important to point out that beliefs serve as a support to be able to achieve results and for this it is inevitable to go through the different categories that are: values, norms, attitudes and behaviors as presented in the previous figure.
Beliefs are not just having faith in what we believe but in what we are doing, it is having the virtue of trusting (in yourself, others and everything that surrounds us), it is giving our word, being faithful, sincere, honest and above all to be consistent with what we believe.
4. What are the standards?
Values play a special role in the formation of norms or rules. The values can be kept individually. However, norms are born from group interactions.
The values inspire the raison d'être of each Institution, the norms become the instruction manuals for the behavior of the company and of the people.
Standards are rules that must be followed, a model to which a job must conform.
Norms are consensual rules of conduct, meanwhile values are criteria for evaluating and accepting or making norms. Likewise, non-compliance with regulations can bring with it external sanctions, while non-compliance with values can convey feelings of guilt and internal sanctions.
The theory of the emergent norm proposes that in situations of confusion, novelty and ambiguity (as in crisis situations), the individual tends to look for a guide or norm that allows him to structure and understand the situation, as well as to interact more with others, and to be influenced by what others do and say, increasing their suggestibility.
5. What are attitudes?
An attitude is the consequence of the values and norms that precede it, in turn it is an evaluative tendency (either positive or negative) with respect to people, events or things. Attitudes reflect how we feel about something or someone and predict our tendency to act in a certain way.
In the case of our country we can observe how the reflection of attitudes characterize the different organizations and companies, that is, the attitudes are preceded by the rules which are strongly present in each of them, but not the values, which are apparently not part of their organizational culture, since they are not defined.
To modify behaviors, rather than directly trying to change attitudes, it is necessary to modify the values and beliefs that precede them.
Are values learned or inherited?
Sociology, a scientific discipline that studies the biological bases of social behavior (in animals and humans), suggests that a good part of our noblest feelings could derive from selected behaviors based on their usefulness for basic survival.
Individual values are constituted and learned fundamentally in childhood and adolescence from the social models of parents, teachers and friends.
In the case of organizations, we can state that the two processes, inheritance and learning, occur, since they are inherited because they are transmitted from individual to individual as a result of the person's training process in that organization or company, and at the same time the fruit is learned of the formation of the process of evolution of human beings, where we have already developed some and we need to acquire others through being part of a certain organization.
How are the Values communicated?
Everyone communicates their values, who they are, and what is important to them. The most meaningful communications about values take place through behavior rather than words, acting rather than speaking.
Values are communicated at any level of human interaction (interpersonally, organizationally, culturally, psychologically, socially, politically, and economically). They communicate sideways and silently, and mostly because of what we do. The values most frequently and effectively communicated in organizations are:
• For what we reward: When those who cause the biggest problems get the most attention.
• For what we punish: When we punish teamwork by calling it fraud.
• By what we say: When we deny responsibility for what we have done.
• For what we do: When we get angry against those who criticize us.
• By Congruence or Hypocrisy: When our words do not correspond to our actions.
• By Processes: When we bow before someone, or we remain silent before the boss.
• For Relationships: When we do not tell the truth to those we love or respect.
• By Character: When we act differently in public than when we are in private.
Communications of values typically fail when organizations act or appear to be hypocritical, when their values directly conflict with one another, and when the values adopted do not match our actions. The difficulty with these discussions is that they lead nowhere, precisely because they have not yet focused on what is really being discussed: the underlying values of the conflict.
However, conflicts over values can be highly productive, particularly when values that are not really contradictory, but complementary opposites, which, like all opposites, are connected by a common axis.
Thinking about Values
Values are difficult to appreciate, articulate, and actualize for many reasons. They stimulate rich and complex questions essential to ethical progress, and suggest useful alternatives for individuals and organizations to consider before beginning to determine their values.
- Why don't people act according to their values? Why does everyone have to fight to keep them? If we stop fighting, would they still be values? What is the value of admitting that we do not always act according to our values? What value do we reaffirm when we recognize that acting according to our values is a struggle? How do we recognize our common struggle to live up to our highest expectations in ways that encourage our mutual development? What is the strategic importance of the reasons we give for not living up to our values? What is the value of clearly articulating a value that we are not fulfilling,and the reasons why we are unable to do so? Could it be that the reasons why we do not live up to our values help us set goals and make strategic decisions, as individuals, teams, organizations and societies? How do we teach values without preaching or moralizing them, or turning them into dogmas? Where and how do we learn our values? What would a values-oriented education look like? What values are learned through experience, dialogue, and contemplation? How can organizations structure experiences about values, or impact them, once they have occurred,to encourage values-based learning? What do we do when values collide or pull us in opposite directions? What determines where organizational values collide? What are the mechanisms by which we choose one value over another? How do we prioritize values when they pull us in opposite directions? What do we do when values are changing? What do we do when important and rapidly changing values such as racial and cultural diversity, or sexual identities and attitudes, appear in the workplace? Are there better ways to learn or teach new values other than blame,punishment and loss of race? What do we do when behaviors do not correspond to values? How do we know if someone is not acting according to their values? How do we avoid becoming "values police" while at the same time providing honest feedback on how behaviors are out of sync with values? How to continually improve our values? How can organizations clarify their priorities on values? How can the levels of improvement articulate values within the same value? How can they learn to continually improve, and not rest on their laurels? How do we create a culture of values? How do we alter organizational cultures to encourage values, and foster awareness and acceptance? How do we improve motivation,recognition and support for values-based behaviors? How can we institutionalize values without violating what made them values in the first place?
These questions are not to prompt answers, but to prompt dialogue and the search for answers that will be different for each organization and person. Its purpose is to reveal an essential truth: a mutual process of searching for answers to open questions oriented towards values that reveal the complex and paradoxical nature of the formation and achievement of values.
Values Reside at the Heart of Organizations.
Values play a defining role in any aspect, characteristic and element of organizational life. Most importantly, they keep organizations human. They encourage leaders, officers, and employees to speak and act from their hearts, as well as from their heads.
In The Art of Japanese Management, Richard Pascal and Tony Athos presented a "7 S" Model of organizations, created with Tom Peters and Bob Waterman (see figure 2). The 7 S Model makes it clear that shared values link and shape every other aspect of organizational life.
- Strategy Structures Systems Values Shared Styles Skills Staff
Figure 2: «7S» Organization Model
The "7 S Model" guides values-based organizational change, and builds consensus on future direction by focusing actions and initiatives on shared values.
Shared Values, reflect both the adopted and the true values, those that are said from "word of mouth" and those that are acted on every day. Team values can be unspoken, yet form the heart of organizational culture.
Strategies, is how to put shared values into practice. It includes plans to carry out the general future course of the organization, which are the guidelines for the action of the teams created by the employees that will implement it.
Systems are the methods or procedures by means of which the organization's internal and external businesses are conducted. Systems are effective when they are based on team values and lead to ethical solutions.
Structures are reflected in organizational charts, work settings, and administration. Organizations have formal and informal structures that may not resemble each other. Team structures reflect values through their flatness, interactivity, and heterarchical design.
Skills, encompass the human resources available in the organization. Each person's skill profile includes their values, collaborative abilities, and ability to resolve team conflicts.
Personnel, includes the number, nature and variety of personnel. Values are reflected in the different forms of diversity, teamwork, job satisfaction, and motivation.
Style, is expressed in the organizational culture and the methods of leadership, management, negotiation, conflict management, and interpersonal relationships. These can be collaborative or antagonistic, interested or insensitive, team-focused or individualistic, bottom-up or top-down.
6. The process of Formation of Values in the company
The formation of values in the company is a complex phenomenon that depends on a multitude of variables, among which are:
• The founder's beliefs and values. Every company arises from a fundamental impulse from an idea and some principles of more or less implicit action. Obtaining financial, material and human resources to carry out this idea is a further step.
• The beliefs and values of the current management. The management of the company, at any given time, may seek to perpetuate, revitalize or even radically modify the beliefs and values of its founder, having to properly manage the conflict between the traditional and the modern.
• The beliefs and values of the employees. As we have already mentioned, the greatest forming force of beliefs and values in employees is, without a doubt, constituted by the existing reward mechanisms.
• The training and influence of consultants. Of course, an essential mechanism for modifying beliefs and values is training. True learning lies in unlearning beliefs and incorporating new ones. This training can come from attending courses such as reading publications or interacting with consultants.
• Existing legal regulations. The labor, environmental, economic, etc. laws of each country also significantly influence the beliefs and values of their companies.
• The rules of the market game. Obviously, the free competition market imposes certain rules of the game that permeate the belief and value system of the company. One of the beliefs most influenced by pressure from competitors is that the immediate result is what matters, regardless of the means of achieving it or even its effects on the long-term viability of the business.
• The social values of each historical moment. At the beginning of the 20th century, the prevailing social values in developed countries were not the same as those of today, and these do not have to be the same as future ones.
• The cultural tradition of each society. There is a mutual influence between social values and business values. In this sense, much of Japan's economic success is due to its impetus to demonstrate collective worth to the accidental world through the incorporation into industrial society of traditional social values oriented towards continuous improvement, harmony, and pride of belonging., etc.
• The results of the company. It is noteworthy that the belief and value systems of the company feed back based on its results.
7. Importance of values
The importance of values lies in the fact that they become a motivating element of human actions and behavior, define the fundamental and definitive character of the organization, create a sense of identity of the personnel with the organization.
They are important because they describe what is essential for those involved, because they identify the results that most expect, guide our actions and determine whether our organization will be successful.
They are also because, when the values are online, we obtain several benefits such as: high morale, trust, collaboration, productivity, success and results.
Therefore, values are formulated, taught and assumed within a concrete reality and not as absolute entities in a social context, representing an option with ideological bases with social and cultural bases.
The values must be clear, equal, shared and accepted by all members and levels of the organization, so that there is a unified criterion that compacts and strengthens the interests of all members with the organization.
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