Aligning and Propagating Organizational Values

That organizational values are positively related to performance is well established by works such as ‘Good to Great’ (Collins, 2001, ) and ‘Built to Last’ (Collins and Porras, 2004, ). Academic works also show several positive relationship such as 1) organizational commitment and citizenship behavior (Cohen, 2011; Arthaud-Day et al., 2012, ; Vurgun and Sezai, 2011), 2) organizational culture and job satisfaction (Danuta & Vytautas, 2011), 3) work engagement (Anna et al., 2013, ), 4) lower burn out (Anna et al., 2013, ), 5) team performance (Arthaud-Day et al., 2012, ), 6) organizational learning (Cohen et al., 2011; Cohen & Liu, 2011), and 7) organizational integration (Levent et. Al, 2011). While values are important, whether we align the values of the individual and organization and propagate them adequately to benefit from their positive relationship is not so clear. This study is motivated by the observation that many MBA students could not easily find the values of many good Indian companies and that they could not easily decipher them when tasked to do so as part of their assignment. Auster and Freeman (2013), also found that value-fit in organizations leaves much to be desired. In this work, I examine the question whether organizations match their values to the individual values and whether they propagate their espoused values in an easy to access manner. Using secondary input procured from the web site of companies that figure among the top 25 in the Business Today's ranking, 2012, I examine these issues by cognitive mapping of the espoused values to the value theory framework (Schwartz, 2006) and find that many organizations do not map their values to the individual values or propagate them in an easily accessible manner. Recommendations are given to mitigate this problem.