Value Analysis in Organizational Context

摘要

In the last two decades there has been a significant development of organizational culture theories inside organizational psychology, which have been largely divulged among managers who have adopted them in their everyday language. Inside those theories one concept occupies a "central role": the concept of value (v.g. Jones, 1983; Smircish, 1983; Schein, 1985). In this book we present a study looking for the role of values inside the organization empirically, Two main goals have guided this research: 1 - The culture producing effect of organizations on values. Corporate culture models state that each organization and its management can induce its own specific organizational culture and consequently its own specific value systems. In this research, it is empirically tested if different enterprises are related with different value systems and if this relationship is stronger than the one established between value systems and Portuguese regions. 2 - The effects of values on perceptions and emotional and behavioral outputs. Several theoretical ftameworks state that values influence the perceptions and the emotional and behavioral outputs of individuais. This statement is empirically tested in an organizational context. Reviewing the literature on values, from philosophy to economics, one can easily observe that different concepts are used in the different fields, which may lead to some difficulties in their study and several misunderstandings. Anyway, the anthropological conception of value (Kluckhohn, 1951) seems dominant in most of the works: its influence is capital in the whole of social and organizational psychology (e.g. Rokeach, 1973 and Schein, 1986). But although the anthropological conception is the broader framework and the common departure point for most psychologists, the latter, when building their theories and operationalizations, arrive at completely different conceptions and instruments. Among these conceptions, two typical ones are very often used: the one of Schein (1986), - "Values are what 'ought' or 'should' be" - , which is more connected with the concept of social norm generally used in social psychology; and the one of Kluckhohn (1951), - "Value is a conception of the desirable that influences the ways people select action and evaluate events" -, which is the conception generally adopted in social psychology (v.g. Rokeach, 1973, Howard et al. 1983, Schwartz and Bilsky, 1987). In this study we adopt the latter definition. Within the scope of this definition it is possible to distinguish various levels of abstraction. Given our organizational interests, we look at two levels of values: a) General and abstract values, - what is desirable and important in people's life in a general way - ; and b) Work related values, - what is desirable and important for people in work, these latter being conceived as a specific domain, i.e. an "area of behavior that is aimed at the same goal" (Vinson et ai. 1977 and Verhallen et ai. 1989). On the first level we adopt the Rokeach Model (Rokeach, 1973) and, on the second level, we have as reference the MOW Model (MOW, 1987). In order to accomplish the first goal of this study, we identified several possible antecedents of values on.both levels. Matching the corporate culture models with the comparative management models, our main interest is centered on the possible influences of enterprises and Portuguese regions on value systems. Beyond these possible effects, we also control personal characteristics, such as education, sex and age, which have been shown to influence values in previous studies (v.g. Rokeach, 1973, 1979; Feather, 1975; Buchhoiz, 1978; MOW, 1987) and the individual history inside the organizations, in regard to which we adopt several indices imported from socialization models (v.g. Van Maanen and Schein, 1979), such as career evolution, seniority, training and supervision. Ali the antecedents are treated on the same level of causality. 179 -CA As we intended to analyse the relationships between values and job/organizational perceptions and emotional and behavioral outputs (second goal), we constructed a heuristic model, where general values play a central cognitive role influencing work related values, job/organizational perceptions and individual outputs. These last ones are conceived as being also influenced by world values and organizational perceptions, Nevertheless, the model is conceived as a reciprocal causality one. In the absence of a global operationalized model of organizations, in this study the concepts and operationalizations used in the job/organizational perceptions and individual outputs are largely based on a revision oi the Hackman and Oldham Model (1980) about job design and on its further developments by Cammmann et al. (1983). In this context, we decided to distinguish between four general leveis of analysis within job/organizational perception: job and role characteristics, group perception, rewards perception and organizational perception. As individual outputs, we consider job . satisfaction, job involvement, organizational commitement and extra-hours at work. The relationships between job/organizational perceptions and individual outputs are conceived according to the postcognitive-nonreairsive model (v.g. Lazarus, 1982, 1984, James and Tetrick, 1986), i,e. even if reciprocally related job perceptions are the first cause of emotional answers, e,g. satisfaction. To attain our goals we decided to use a large survey. But before building it we conducted a pilot-study, based on 20 semi-directive interviews looking for specific values in Portugal and possible subjective impressions of change in value systems during the individual's organizational life. Data analysis showed that the general values brought up by the interviewees can be located in Rokeach's terminal and instrumental value systems, showing once again (see Rokeach 1973,1979, Feather, 1975, Ng et al., 1982, Schwartz and Bilsky, 1987) the rather universal character of these systems. The analysis of the work related values, suggested by the Portuguese sample, showed that the majority of them can be placed in the work related value system proposed by the MOW Team (1987). However a new work related value appeared in a very significant way: To attain goals/results", suggesting a strong intrinsic work motivation in the Portuguese population, so that we included it in our scale. About value changes, there was a near consensus about their evolution during the period after the admission to the organization, white this evolution was attributed to friends and colleagues, Nevertheless, the individuais had some difficulties in indicating which values had become more or less important in that period. Once constructed, the survey was applied to two Portuguese enterprises (N = 452) with different activities and characteristics but each one with identical structures, procedures and jobs in the three Portuguese regions considered. With this design, we intended to control the effects of the enterprises on the values in contrast with the effects of the regions. Comparing the two enterprises, enterprise 1 (N = 195) is big, with a stable environment, consisting of blue and white collar workers and managed like a public service, while enterprise 2 (N = 257) is smaller, with a strong competitive environment, comprising only white collar workers and managed like a private company. In the latter there is less absenteeism, a higher productivity, a higher average remuneration and promotions based on individual appraisals (in El promotions are mainly based on automatisms). The three Portuguese regions include the most developed (Lisboa) and one of the most underdeveloped of Portugal (Evora). Given the large number of variables in our survey and to avoid too complex patterns difficult to interpret, we use principal component analysis on all logical groups of variables. Thus, with the general values we got five factors explaining 35 percent of the variance. The last four factors found show a strong convergence with the factors found in previous researches (Rokeach, 1973 and Howard et ai. 1983), which induced us to name them in the same way: competence -versus-morality, self-constriction -versus- self-expression, personal/emotional -versus- social oriented and delayed -versus- immediate gratification. Only factor 1: non-conflict -versus- enlarger seems more specific to our sample, although the enlarger pole is quite similar to the one found by Howard et al .(1983) with American and Japanese managers. 180 In regard to work related values, 5 factors were identified, explaining 54 percent of the variance, with some similarities with the MOW Team findings (1987), but also with some specific differences. Nevertheless, we discovered that adopting the same kind of ranking/rating scale used by the MOW Team had not been a good choice: during collecting data some respondents showed some doubts about how to answer (which had not happened during the pre-test) and once the data plotting was done we got a distribution that could have been influenced by chance. After analysing the logical relationships between general and work related values the factor chance was excluded, but we are careful with the interpretations related to work related values. For principal component analysis, the job/organizational perceptions were grouped into 8 categories: job/role perceptions, work group functioning, supervision, reward systems, structure perception, procedures, norms and perception of the organization as a whole. For each new scale, reliabilities are offered. The same is done in regard to the scales of the individual outputs. In a first approach, we tested the differences in values between enterprises and between regions. From this analysis, it is possible to conclude that each enterprise is dominated by rather different general and work related values, while the three Portu.