Most organisations have one. Four to six words on a wall, a website or the back of a lanyard: Integrity. Teamwork. Excellence. Respect. Innovation. Staff are asked to “live the values”, and new hires are told the values are “who we are”.
I’m a bit sceptical. Not of values themselves, but of the idea that naming them changes how anyone behaves.
Everyone agrees, so nothing is decided
Try listing the values an organisation might reasonably hold: integrity, candour, kindness, loyalty, fairness, speed, quality, safety, innovation, reliability, autonomy, consistency, transparency, confidentiality, wellbeing, results. You’ll reach seventy without trying, and every one is defensible.
Now notice how they pull against each other. Candour versus kindness in a performance conversation. Speed versus safety on a deadline. Loyalty versus fairness when promoting a long-serving colleague over a stronger candidate. Transparency versus confidentiality in a restructure. Wellbeing versus results in a busy quarter.
Values rarely need to guide us when they agree. They matter when they collide, and a list of five nouns says nothing about which one wins.
Values research quietly concedes this. Milton Rokeach made people rank values rather than rate them, and Shalom Schwartz scores values relative to each person’s own average, because nearly everyone rates honesty and fairness highly. Bardi and Schwartz found that behaviour tracks the trade-off between competing values, not the strength of any one.
Maio and Olson went further, showing that many values are held as “truisms”: strongly endorsed, rarely examined and easily knocked over when challenged. A corporate values list is a set of truisms. No one disagrees with “integrity”. But ask what it requires when a report is due at 5pm on a Friday and one check hasn’t been done, and you’ll get five different answers.
Why statements don’t shift behaviour
First, people bring their own value priorities to work. In what Walter Mischel called “weak situations”, where nothing clearly settles what to do, personal values and habits decide. A poster doesn’t override a lifetime of preferences.
Second, an unranked list is a justification resource. Philip Tetlock showed that people find explicit trade-offs uncomfortable and tend to avoid them. We decide first, then reach for whichever value supports the decision. Let someone go and it was “accountability”. Keep them and it was “loyalty”. The list can defend almost anything after the fact.
So values statements drift towards what sociologists Meyer and Rowan called decoupling: formal structures adopted for legitimacy while daily practice runs on its own. Enron’s values were communication, respect, integrity and excellence. When economists Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales examined corporate values, the values companies proclaimed had no relationship with performance. What employees perceived about management’s integrity did.
Where I’d be careful
It would be easy to conclude that values statements are pure impression management, but I’d stop short of that, for two reasons.
First, they do some work in recruitment. They tell applicants what an organisation claims to care about, and people self-select in or out. Person–organisation fit research links that to satisfaction and retention. That’s an effect on who joins rather than how they behave once inside, but it isn’t nothing.
Second, “the contexts are too varied to predict” overstates it. Situations vary endlessly on the surface, but the underlying dilemmas recur. Most roles face the same handful of trade-offs again and again.
What works: say who wins
The value statements that do shape behaviour share one feature: they settle a recurring trade-off in advance. There are several ways to do it.
Rank them. Disney’s theme parks use four keys (Safety, Courtesy, Show, Efficiency) in deliberate priority order. Pilots learn “aviate, navigate, communicate”, because under stress people attend to the wrong thing.
Name the loser. The Agile Manifesto values “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”, adding that “while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”
Make it conditional. Amazon separates irreversible “one-way door” decisions, which deserve slow deliberation, from reversible “two-way door” decisions, which deserve speed. Same tension, resolved by decision type.
Set a threshold. Ritz-Carlton staff can reportedly spend up to about US$2,000 to resolve a guest’s problem without approval. Customer care versus cost control, settled with a number.
Give authority to the person on the ground. Any Toyota worker can pull the andon cord and stop the line for a quality problem. Quality beats output, and the person who sees the problem can act on it.
State the cost you’ll accept. Johnson & Johnson’s 1943 Credo ranks patients ahead of employees, communities and, “finally”, shareholders. The 1982 Tylenol recall is the classic example of it being honoured. J&J’s later product-safety litigation is the reminder that a ranked statement doesn’t enforce itself. Priorities only count when leaders visibly act on them.
What this looks like in practice
In my own field, return-to-work and pre-employment assessment, there are recurring trade-offs. For example:
“We tell workers the truth about their capacity, even when it’s unwelcome. Care shapes how we say it, not whether we say it.”
Each names both sides of a tension and says in advance which one wins.
The takeaway
Generic values statements are mostly signalling. Values that specify who wins when they collide, and are visibly enforced, can guide behaviour.
If your organisation has a values list, try this test. Pick two of your values and ask what happens when they conflict. If no one can answer, you don’t have clear values yet, just vocabulary.
Further reading
Bardi, A. & Schwartz, S. H. (2003). Values and behavior: Strength and structure of relations. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Guiso, L., Sapienza, P. & Zingales, L. (2015). The value of corporate culture. Journal of Financial Economics.
Lencioni, P. (2002). Make your values mean something. Harvard Business Review.
Maio, G. R. & Olson, J. M. (1998). Values as truisms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Meyer, J. W. & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology.
Tetlock, P. E. (1986). A value pluralism model of ideological reasoning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.