Stephen Billing’s Blog

OK, here’s the guts on corporate values. I draw on George Herbert Mead’s Mind, Self and Society and Ralph Stacey’s Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics (p397) in explaining why I am so critical of corporate "shared values." These three flaws are showstoppers.

The first fatal flaw of shared values is anthropomorphism, the second is that values are cult values and third is that values are always in conflict.

This post addresses the problem of anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism means attributing the characteristics of a person to an object or animal.

We treat the organisation as if it were a person when we say it has values. Organisations are not people, they do not have consciousness and they do not have values.

Mead pointed out that humans have a tendency to individualise a collective and treat it as if it had its own overriding motives or values.

So we tend to talk about our organisations as though they are objects or things. Further, we tend to think of them as though they were human things. Then we attribute to our organisations human characteristics such as a sense of purpose and values.

Shared values projects attempt to identify these overriding motives or values of the organisation. As I have alluded to above, there is no such thing as a set of overriding values of the organisation – they do not actually exist. The humans involved in the organisation might each have their own overriding values or motives, but the organisation itself does not.

Values are attractive because they give a feeling of an enlarged personality in which individuals participate and from which they derive their value as persons. No doubt there is also the appeal to managers that they might be able to use these overriding values in service of their own managerial objectives and goals.

However, organisations are not individual humans, they are collectives made up of patterns of human interaction that constitute individual and collective identities. While organisations have a legal identity they are not actually sentient beings and they cannot hold values in the way an individual human being can.

So, it is a logical non-sense to say that organisations can have shared values. If that is not enough reason to be critical of the idea of shared values, there is another one coming up in the next post – the cult aspects of shared values.