The predominant assumption in the management literature is that corporate values
are internalised into organisational members' personal value systems. Corporate
values, viewed in this way, perform a controlling role in organisations, consistent
with the characteristics of a deliberate strategy perspective. Theories concerning
the nature of personal values challenge this assumption of corporate value
internalisation. However, there is a lack of empirical research in the management
field investigating the relationship between personal and corporate value systems.
In this interpretive research study, I explore managers' interpretation of their
organisation's corporate values, and relate these to their personal value priorities.
Senior managers from three commercial companies took part in the study: one
with no published corporate values statement; one with a recently introduced
statement; and the third with a well established corporate values statement. I
explore how managers interpret their organisation's corporate values through the
description and meaning they give to value terms, and elicit their personal values
by using an adaptation of the laddering technique, and by inferring values
revealed in managers' narrative of their career histories.
The findings show that managers feel they share their corporate values but
interpret them in differing ways, both through those they identify as representing
the corporate values, and through the meaning they give to value terms. The
variation in interpretation is consistent with differences in their own personal
value priorities, suggesting that managers adapt corporate values so that they more
closely reflect their own. These findings challenge the notion that corporate
values provide an effective means of normative control, and instead suggest they
legitimise the worldview of individual managers, thus enabling differences to be
accommodated within a broad framework of shared values. A model of value
relationships is proposed, suggesting a way that corporate values may assist in
bringing together deliberate and emergent strategy perspectives