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IMPORTANCE OF VALUES AND
ATTITUDES IN THE WORKPLACE
Victor Hsiung*
Organizations today are no longer simple businesses that run on one
philosophy, focusing on one area of expertise. Organizations today are more like
living and breathing organisms, focusing on many brands and sectors
simultaneously, tapping into a vast network of knowledge across all industries,
changing and molding it into different forms to fit the current environment.
Businesses today face many complex challenges: growth, competition from other
sectors, the need to be agile and change in a fast moving global economy, and
most importantly, the ongoing war of finding the best talent. Without the right
talent in today’s world, people who can work under fast-changing environments,
knowledge across industries, and expertise in running all facets of an organization,
is critical to the long-term success of organizations today.
With people being such a critical component to sustaining long-term growth
plans, organizations today are putting more and more effort in finding the best
people to lead them into the future. Hiring practices, reputation, and having the
brightest fighting to work for your organization sounds like a good thing, but is it
really?
Businesses today can have the methods of attracting and hiring the best,
but what happens when people leave quickly or even end up harming your
business in the long run? Should businesses really be hiring the best, or hiring
the best fit?
What can they do once the talent they are looking for have been
hired?
Once an organization has the people they desire, what keeps them and shapes
them are the values and attitudes of the organization. When looking at values
and attitudes, we need to focus on the following: what they mean to the
*
Training Manager of Grand Hyatt Taipei.
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organization, why they are important, how they are developed, and how they
affect all levels of the organization. In this article, the author will look at how
values and attitudes influence the workplace and how it affects organizations at all
levels, from the community down to the individual, and whether to hire for talent
or finding the right fit is more important to the ultimate success of an organization.
What makes for a successful organization?
Companies must be able to
answer the question of how to motivate their workforce, how to align people of
vastly different personalities to meet company goals, and treat them in ways that
will lead them to become long-term employees of the organization. Besides the
obvious examples of great product and unique services, the organizational culture
is the fundamental principle that allows an organization to continually grow, as it
affects people, who are the catalyst to the success of every organization.
Since organizational culture sets the boundaries for how your employees
should act, we must first answer the question of what organizational culture
actually is. This article will look at Values and Attitudes from four perspectives.
The community, the organization, the business unit, and the individual and will
highlight the importance of unifying values and attitudes at each stage to create a
truly successful organization.
The organization’s success with values and its prevailing employee attitudes
depend on the following: Understanding the cultural values of the community,
having executives create a direction and vision using core values to inspire
employees, leadership in the business unit who espouse these values and are
respected by their employees, and the individual, who must believe in the values
and show it through their attitudes.
To begin defining organizational culture, executives and leaders must
understand the culture of the community. In today’s global climate, values which
might work for a headquarter in based in America, will likely need to slightly
altered for different geographic location, such as Asia.
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The reason is that
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cultures and beliefs vary widely throughout the world.
One definition of culture
is, “Culture is the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their
experience and guide their action. It is an ordered system of meaning and of
symbols in terms of which social interaction takes place” (Tharp, 2009). Since
cultures help to define values and values, in turn, define individual attitudes, top
leadership in all organizations need to understand the local community before
developing their core value systems, as the local climate and attitudes will help
shape and effective organizational value system.
Organizational Culture and Values is seen today as a way to improve
organizational performance by aligning core values with human capital.
Organizational value systems typically tend to be developed over time. A core
value system will be created, but as much like human growth, through experience
comes knowledge, and with that knowledge, initial value systems will change
based on what a company learns as it grows. According to Edgar Schein, from
MIT’s Sloan School of Management, he interprets organizational culture as, “a
pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems
of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be
considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members s the correct way to
perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems”.
What this means is that
values come from experience. A new company will have a new value system,
but will change over time as new experiences are gained.
In essence, a
company’s prevailing ideas, values, attitudes, and beliefs guide the ways in which
its employees think, feel, and act – quite often unconsciously (Tharp, 2009).
The real challenges facing organizations today are actually in people capital.
Finding the right people who have the skills, knowledge, and abilities to succeed is
most important. Therefore, it is critical that a company understands their core
business and values and attracts people who can have positive attitudes and use
those values to guide their work performance.
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What truly makes good
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companies great is their ability to attract and retain the right people – employees
who are excited by what they’re doing and the environment they are operating in.
Companies that successfully create and communicate signature experiences
understand that different types of people will excel at different companies, and
that not all workers want the same things. As a result, these companies hire
people who easily and enthusiastically fit in, and thereby cultivate a more
committed workforce (Erickson, 2007).
Organizations must also be able to create a culture suited to them and create
their values and principles to live by.
Then, they must be able to provide a
signature experience that presents its values as to how it works as an organization.
For instance, JetBlue realized that the most important people in their chain of
command were the reservation agents as they were the first people customers
would contact. To create a motivated workforce, with low pay, they allowed
their agents to work from home and accommodated their schedules, by allowing
unlimited shift changes, which employees were responsible for. They would go
onto an online community to work out shift changes. Because the agents feel
that the organization cares about them, they are happy and motivated, and are
more than likely to provide better customer service.
The style, pace,
communication, and compensations styles are all part of a larger package that
signifies to new hires what they will be experiencing when they come on board to
work for your organization.
When you look at varying companies like the
Royal Bank of Scotland, with tight deadlines, fast paced work environment and
organizations like W.L. Gore where there is no set management hierarchy and
employees need to highlight their own goals and what they are going to do to help
their business unit achieve their goals and compensation is given based on
performance, you realize the importance of having a signature experience
(Erickson, 2007). The reason for its importance is that organizations need to
realize that every individual is unique and their attitudes towards the workplace
will be different. Do you want someone who is organized, needs clear goals and
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direction or someone who wants freedom to achieve what they set out to achieve
and like to work in an ambiguous work environment?
Being able to define that
before an employee comes on board will lead to better retention results as
potential hires could have a good grasp of the work environment they will be
entering and whether it is something they desire and feel suited for.
Whether the organization is new or established, its core value system must stay
intact.
Having an established value system in place is important because it
affects how the business unit operates and contributes to the overall long-term
success of the organization. Values must trickle down from the executive level
to the business units. Therefore, it is critical to highlight the importance of
middle management and succession planning.
Organizations today must not only
create core values, but must put the right people in place to ensure that those
values are adhered to from the top down.
The leader of each business unit is critical to shaping the attitudes of an
organization’s employees.
Individual employees are more than capable of
grasping and understanding company values, and can use it as a guide, but the risk
is if their attitudes are not positive, they will not use those values to guide their
actions. Therefore, a leader who buys into the organization’s value set and has
the right attitude can create a successful business unit. When the leader is right,
then the people naturally follow him in his right course. When he makes a
mistake in his conduct, the people imitate him. When he makes no mistakes in his
speech or his conduct, then the people learn respect for him without laws or
regulations (Fernandez, 2004).
One can adjust to one’s behavior to what is expected, but one’s actions may
not be the true reflection of one’s convictions and preferences (Fernandez, 2004).
In essence, an organization’s success fundamentally begins with the leaders of the
business unit. Ideally, you will have leaders, in this case, your middle managers,
in place who have lived and espouse the organization’s values.
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Individual
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employees can see how their bosses act and whether they are in accordance with
the company’s values. In the Confucian system of thought, leadership is an
emergent quality of the character that radiates and makes others want to follow,
based on the respect and trust the leader generates.
Leaders can influence whether the unit conducts its business ethically, morally,
and honestly and are the catalyst for helping to develop employees into the type of
long-term candidates that organizations need to retain in todays globally
competitive environment. By creating a rewarding workplace, where they can
show employees’ results, and showing achievement through living cultural values,
the leader can begin to show a road map to the individual and allow them to begin
building a future with the organization. However, the critical area that they must
focus on is the attitude of the individual.
For some, culture is considered the
“glue” that holds and organization together and for others, the “compass” that
provides direction (Tharp, 2009). For leaders, they must successfully manage
both to influence the individual.
There are two factors that affect values and attitudes at the individual level: the
immediate supervisor (leader) and co-workers. The goal of the organization must
be able to align company values and organizational cultures to individual needs
and desires. According to Hofstede, values and attitudes take on an individual
component based on the following: how one feels about the situation (attitude) and
what state of affairs one would prefer (values). He found that the culture of the
business unit might not directly affect individual attitudes and values, but found
that “good communication” and “cooperation” was essential to a satisfied
employee (Hofstede, 1998).
Although this research found a neutral reaction,
one must take into account that organizational culture let’s the employee
understand “how things work around here” and in turn does affect how people
communicate and work with each other. Whether their direct superiors are living
and working towards by the organization’s guidelines and working towards those
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goals goes a long way towards employee attitudes in general. Should employee
attitudes be positive, their value system will also lead to higher achievement goals
and the will to reach them.
As an individual, let’s go back and look at values and attitudes once more.
What do values and attitudes look like at an individual level?
Values are
perceived by individuals to be broad preferences concerning appropriate courses
of actions of outcomes; while attitudes are the positive or negative associations the
person has with those values (Fernandez, 2004). Therefore, it is the role of the
leader to build a team that buys in to the culture and value an organization sets out
to create. If leaders and people are abiding by those standards, even if the core
attitude of the individual is not congruent with the value of the company, the
group standards will allow the employee to overcome their individual biases and
live the values of the organizations until they progress to a point where their
individual beliefs and attitudes can no longer accept and work by the
organization’s value.
What this means is that organizations will more than likely
find few individuals who are a “perfect” fit with their core values. In turn, these
individuals will follow how the group works and progress along in their careers
until they feel a high enough level of ambiguity and dissonance with the company
values and their individual values and attitudes.
At this point, the individual will
most likely leave the company. Therefore, it is still important for organizations to
remember to espouse and live their values, but let employees work and progress
through their careers to where they are comfortable.
Leaders need to identify
long-term candidates for development as well as fully utilize the capabilities of
individuals destined to leave the organization.
If leadership plays a critical role in shaping the business unit because acting as
a conduit for the organizations values will allow them to lead a team of like
minded individual, then co-workers become just as important a factor in
influencing the values and attitudes of the individual.
Coughlan, 2005, proposed
a hypothesis where loyalty is illustrated when the actions of an individual
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repeatedly reflect the community’s moral values and should individuals feel those
values have merit, they will use those principles consistently as guidelines for
behavior. To state simply, values are the driving force for our decision-making
and values are what we care about (Keeney, 1992).
These two experiments
highlighted the fact that individuals still tend to follow “group” behaviors even if
their individual beliefs are different. Therefore, leaders must understand how to
create a team that works towards the same goals using company values to guide
their practices.
Another reason why organizational values are important is for retention.
Losing employees and replacing them comes at a major cost to organizations
through loss of experience, selection process, training, and acclimatization period
for the new employee.
Should values be clear and individual attitudes are
positive, organizations can avoid these situations. According to Smith, 2012, it
showed that team leader validation positively predicted both team and
organizational satisfaction.
In addition, perceived fairness of treatment also
significantly and positively predicted organizational satisfaction.
Therefore, it is extremely important that the way leaders interact with their
employees’ plays a significant role as to whether employee attitudes are positive
and will lead to value attitude congruency. Motivated and satisfied employees
typically lead to successful business units and the overall health of the
organization.
The Gallup Organization (Buckingham, 1999) conducted a large-scale survey
and interview study across all industries asking twelve questions to rate employee
engagement and satisfaction in their workplace. Of those twelve questions, they
found that through all industries, there was a consistent measure of what
successful and profitable business units looked like. Successful business units
scoring high on the following:
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1. I know what is expected me at work.
2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
3. I have the opportunity to do what I do best everyday.
4. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for my good
work.
5. My supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person.
6. There is someone at work who encourages my development.
We can see from these results that if the individual is scoring high on those six
questions, their attitude towards the organization is definitely positive. Again,
these questions were asked through all types of industries, meaning they are
asking many different firms with many different values what success is. What
we can glean from this is that at the core, as long as organizations values are clear,
easy to understand and follow, and have the buy-in of the individual, these six
questions can be answered positively using the type of work environment you
have for all individuals.
You do a disservice to your organization if you try to be all things to all people
(Erickson, 2007). Organizations today should be adamant about creating a strong
culture. Don’t create values that fit all people. A defined value set will attract
the types of employees you want long term. As for others, it might fit their
career path for a certain period of time.
Talent is talent and understanding what
type of talent you are looking for will lead to long-term success.
Leaders create organization cultures and, therefore, one of the most important
functions of a leader is the creation, management, and sometimes the destruction,
of a culture. An organization’s culture reflects the values, beliefs and attitudes of
its members. These values and beliefs foster norms that influence employee
behaviors (Barry, 2003). With a system of core values in place, organizations can
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then move forward to their reputation. How to improve it; expand its reach in the
public, and more importantly, how to keep it. People today do place high value on
an organization’s priorities, their values, their charitable, how the operate, and the
colleagues that they will work with. Having a good value system and reputation
will lead to more effective recruitment, increased retention and motivation of
existing employees, and creation of competitive advantage (Hepburn, 2005).
To conclude, one must remember that values and attitudes are not separated by
size or space. Instead values and attitudes are created and lived through the
interaction of the community, organization, business unit, and the individual. If
one part is not living by the values created by the organization or the
organization’s values do not fit the overall culture, the organization will not be as
successful as it should be.
Positive values and attitudes take much time,
coordination, and effort. It takes the community to provide the framework, the
organization to fill the details, the business unit to live those values daily, and the
individual to have a positive attitude to use those values as a guide in their
everyday performance and decision-making.
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