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T&D 飛訊第 152 期 發行日期:101 年 10 月 01 日 第 1 頁,共 12 頁 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. 1 T&D 飛訊第 152 期 發行日期:101 年 10 月 01 日 第 2 頁,共 12 頁 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. 2 The reason is that T&D 飛訊第 152 期 發行日期:101 年 10 月 01 日 第 3 頁,共 12 頁 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. 3 What truly makes good T&D 飛訊第 152 期 發行日期:101 年 10 月 01 日 第 4 頁,共 12 頁 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 4 T&D 飛訊第 152 期 發行日期:101 年 10 月 01 日 第 5 頁,共 12 頁 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. 5 Individual T&D 飛訊第 152 期 發行日期:101 年 10 月 01 日 第 6 頁,共 12 頁 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 6 T&D 飛訊第 152 期 發行日期:101 年 10 月 01 日 第 7 頁,共 12 頁 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 7 T&D 飛訊第 152 期 發行日期:101 年 10 月 01 日 第 8 頁,共 12 頁 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: 8 T&D 飛訊第 152 期 發行日期:101 年 10 月 01 日 第 9 頁,共 12 頁 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 9 T&D 飛訊第 152 期 發行日期:101 年 10 月 01 日 第 10 頁,共 12 頁 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. 10 T&D 飛訊第 152 期 發行日期:101 年 10 月 01 日 第 11 頁,共 12 頁 11 T&D 飛訊第 152 期 發行日期:101 年 10 月 01 日 第 12 頁,共 12 頁 REFERENCES Barry, M. and Slocum, J.W. (2003). Changing culture at pizza hut and yum! brands, inc. Organizational Dynamics, 43(4), 319-330. Brief, A.P., Aldag, R. J. (2001). The self in work organizations: a conceptual review. Academy of Management Review, 6:75-88. Buckingham, M, Coffman, C. (1999). First, break all the rules: what the world’s greatest managers do differently. Simon & Schuster: New York, NY. Coughlan, R. (2005). Employee loyalty as adherence to shared moral values. Journal of Managerial Issues, 17(1), 43-57. Erickson, T.J. and Gratton, L. (2007). What it means to work here. Harvard Business Review, 85(3), 104-112. Fernandez, J.A. (2004). Leadership by values. Organizational Dynamics, 33(1), 21-31. Hepburn, S. (2005). Creating a winning employer reputation: ensuring a positive perception from internal and external stakeholders. Communications Management, 4(4), 20-23. Hofstede, G. (1998). Attitudes, values and organizational culture: disentangling the concepts. Organization Studies, 19(3), 477-492. Keeney, R.L. (1992). Value-focused thinking. University Press. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Smith, L.G.E., Amiot, C.E., Callan, V.J., et al. (2012). Getting new staff to stay: the mediating role of organizational identification. British Journal of Management, 23:45-64. Tharp, B.M. (2009). Defining culture and organizational culture: from anthropology to the office. HAWORTH. From: http://www.haworth.com/en.us/Knowledge/Workplace-Library/Documents/D efining-Culture-and-Organizationa-Culture_5.pdf 12