Do Corporate Values Matter to Workers?

Turtle tracks going into the sea. The Galápagos Islands, Archipelago in Ecuador.

Source: Image by Erin Krupka

"Our grandparents may not have received a glossy handout with a declaration of their company’s ethical standards as part of their onboarding process, but many of us today will. Corporate values play an important role in how businesses recruit and how workers evaluate employers.

But do they actually matter? For the bottom line? For employee turnover? For anything? There are a couple of hurdles that make it hard to answer that question. One hurdle is identifying whether the real ethical values bosses and employees have are the same ones they say they have. A second is linking those real values to behavior and long-term outcomes in business settings.

How can we get truthful responses when asking about ethically sensitive behavior? Would executives be frank about the extent of their own rule-bending or non-compliance with company policy? Can we get truthful responses from employees if we ask them whether they think their employers have integrity and uphold the values they say they have?

In 2012, economics professor Stephen Burks and I adapted a game that allowed us to identify the ethical values held by employees and bosses and to connect those values to behavior. The Values Game overcomes hurdles like truthful reporting, fear, or retribution by using anonymity and asking participants to tell us about other people’s attitudes rather than their own.

The Values Game asks employees and bosses to read about a common ethical situation faced in their organization (for the 2012 study we developed the situations with organizational leadership). Their task is to rate the actions that the hypothetical person in the story could take.

But there’s a catch. Each player is told to guess how most of their colleagues would rate each action and, separately, how most of their bosses would rate each action. Because everyone is guessing how most other people would rate the action, we get a sense of what each respondent thinks the real ethical values are among their colleagues and among their bosses.

To give each person a reason to guess as best as they can, we pay them up to $250 if they correctly anticipate the most common rating. At the very end, we also ask them what they personally think (and of course they can lie or tell the truth about those questions)."

Back in 2012, using the responses from the Values Game, we found that there were situations where employees felt that their team’s values were different from their boss’ ethical values. For example, their team norm was to “do what it takes” to make the sale (like in the story with David). However, bosses said they valued doing things correctly over making the sale. We also found situations where individual employees personally did not share their team’s “do what it takes” values. Yet other employees indicated that they personally thought it was *very acceptable* and that Tonya should not report David.

Read the full available article on Psychology Today

Reflection: Do you have any suggestions in how workers and bosses ethical view and team values can more easily be alligned with eachother?

#Values #Ethics #Worker #Boss #Views