3 Organisational values and vision

This section builds on your work on understanding personal values and how they work with those of organisations. Two main areas are discussed:

• What are organisational values?
• Why might conflict arise?

Figure 4 Organisational culture

Show description|Hide description

A collection of post-it notes representing shared organisational values. There is one post-it note in the middle, which says shared values. The other notes are arranged in a circle around it. Reading clockwise from the top, the post-it notes say: staff; strategy; systems; structure; style; skills.

Figure 4 Organisational culture

Much has been written about how values contribute to organisational culture in organisations across all three sectors (public, private and voluntary). Projecting an image of a strong organisational culture and a sense of shared values has been regarded as a useful marketing tool for organisations (Watson, 1996 cited in Hester et al., 2013, p. 306). In the context of the voluntary sector, voluntary organisations are often perceived to be particularly value-driven.

Organisational values may be similar to the types of personal values you have explored so far this week such as helping others, showing compassion, making a difference and so on. They are usually expressed in a more collaborative way, i.e. ‘we believe’ or ‘our objective is to …’ and so on. Just as personal values are the set of beliefs and principles guiding people’s behaviour, this also applies to organisations and how they work in practice.

Values (in theory) guide organisations’ activities, services offered, recruitment and management policies. Sometimes an organisation’s values might be expressed as more ‘aspirational’ – this is what we want to achieve but we might not be there yet. Forrest et al. (2012, p. 1) at Cass Business School in London conducted a large-scale survey and detailed case studies on values in voluntary organisations. They found from their case studies that the words most frequently used to express values were:

• collaborate
• respect
• compassionate
• excellence
• professional
• creative.

The next activity illustrates how personal values might link with those of organisations.