At different points in your professional career, it is useful to identify your core values. Values are the qualities considered the most important guiding principles that determine priorities in your life and greatly influence your career choices. Your career brings happiness when it aligns with the beliefs you hold about what is important and meaningful to you. Being aware of your values will help you develop a clearer idea of what is most important to you in life.
Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny
-Mahatma Gandhi
What are values?
The dictionary definition of values is “The important and enduring beliefs or ideals held by members of a culture about what is good or bad and desirable or undesirable.” Rockeach (1973) defines values as “a specific mode of conduct or end state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or reverse mode of conduct or end state of existence”.
Importance of values for individuals:
Values provide a framework for making choices between desirable and undesirable responses. Values are derived from the basic assumptions held by a group of people about themselves, others, and the world. Values also refer to the priorities that an individual assigns to a multiplicity of goals. It thus orients individuals and determines the intensity of individual responses. The stronger the value system, the more intense the action in pursuit of that value. Values have a major influence on a person’s behavior and attitude and serve as broad guidelines in all situations. Some common business values are fairness, innovation and community involvement.
Your values are the things you consider important in the way you live and work. They determine your priorities and are likely the metrics you use to know if your career is changing and progressing the way you want it to. When the things you do and the goals you pursue align with your values, you feel accomplished, satisfied, and satisfied. But when your actions don’t match your values, you feel unhappy. Values thus affecting all our decisions and actions and having a self-prophetic impact on our being.
Values in the organizational context:
For organizations to achieve unity of action among diverse employees, it is imperative that they articulate core values and seek adherence to those values by individuals. The core values of an organization derive from the vision and expectations of strategic stakeholders.
In the global economic order, the sustenance and growth of organizations depend on their ability to become active agents in transforming the environment to make it conducive to the expression of their ideas and intentions. This leads to the need to develop an organizational vision and articulate a set of values emphasizing their responses to the demands of internal and external stakeholders. Values provide a framework for individuals to prioritize their actions, make a choice of options, determine preferred ways to respond, and distinguish between desirable and undesirable responses. Given its importance, it is evident that unity of action among employees towards the common goals of the organization can only be achieved if they adhere to a common set of values.
In the era of pre-liberalization, the value system in organizations developed mainly from the social value system making the organization a microcosm of the society as a whole. In the current and emerging scenario, organizations must make conscious choices regarding the development of value systems that would allow them to gain and maintain competitive advantage. Most organizations therefore articulate core values such as quality, customer satisfaction, environmental protection, employee development, human dignity and respect, integrity, technological development, social responsibility, etc and make them an integral part of their daily operation.
How does Value System work?
Personal values provide an internal reference for what is good, beneficial, important, useful, beautiful, desirable, constructive, etc. Values generate behaviors and help solve common human problems for survival through comparative value rankings, the results of which provide answers to the questions of why people do what they do and in what order they choose to do it. TO DO. Values operate at at least three levels: individual, socio-cultural and organizational levels. Individuals belonging to the same socio-cultural environment may differ in their value system. At the individual level, the value tends to differ in terms of importance and intensity. Each individual therefore develops a hierarchy of values. Socio-cultural value systems are derived from fundamental beliefs about the nature of society and its relationship to the environment. It has its historical roots in the cultural traditions of society and in its triumphs and trials. Similarly, organizations develop their own value system mostly cut off from compulsions to survive as a viable entity.
Adherence to organizational values:
Most organizations articulate some core values that employees should adhere to. The success of adhering to these values relies on the effort, dedication and implementation of these values by its employees in their day-to-day operations, how they treat their colleagues, deal with strategic/external partners and how they get results. Employees must learn to accept these values and begin to believe in them and follow them in their daily actions. When values are shared by all members of an organization, they are extraordinarily important tools for making judgments, evaluating the likely results of contemplated actions, and choosing among alternatives.
Establishing moral principles means determining the core values that should guide the organization, however, an organization may publish a set of values, perhaps in an effort to project a positive image to the outside world, but the values that really guide organizational behavior in practice can be very different. When there is a discrepancy between declared values and operational values, it can be very difficult for employees to determine what is “acceptable”.
Value update:
The core values developed by the organization must be internalized by the members of the organization in order to bridge the gap between the value system of individuals and that of the community. However, what if the members of the organization do not share and have not internalized the values of the organization? Obviously, there will be a disconnect between individual and organizational values and the value system will be dysfunctional. In the absence of a conscious effort to develop a shared value system, employees will continue to adhere to their archaic value system derived from old assumptions, or by the predominant value system that prevails in their socio-cultural environment. In either case, the organization will not be able to optimally channel the energies and efforts of its members towards targeted action. It is therefore appropriate, within the overall framework of the company’s value system, for each department, each function, and group of identifiable products or services to develop operational values relevant to the requirements of their task and their respective contexts.
Explore the values checklist and get a better understanding of yourself!
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Creation date Thursday, February 14, 2013 Hits 8475