WHAT DOES YOUR COMPANY REALLY STAND FOR?
For years, as scholars of organizational behavior and as corporate consultants, we’ve researched what you might think of as the value of values. We’ve conducted dozens of studies designed to determine how a clear understanding of individual and organizational values can affect decision-making, motivation, relationships, well-being, leadership, and performance.
What we’ve discovered in this work is striking: When you align your organization’s values with both your strategy and the values of your employees - creating what we call values alignment—you reap all sorts of benefits: higher job satisfaction, lower turnover, better teamwork, more-effective communication, bigger contributions to the organization, more-productive negotiations, and, perhaps surprisingly, more diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our favorite finding involved the impact of values alignment on the turnover of chief operating officers. When we studied the divisions of one multiunit organization, we found that COOs whose values alignment was low needed a salary increase of 40% to become as likely to stay in their jobs as those whose values alignment was high. Imagine that: An increase in values alignment had as great an effect as a 40% raise.