Value Congruence in the Work Place

Abstract

This study re-examined the impact of personal and organizational values congruency on positive work outcomes and investigated the extent to which this relationship is affected by demographic variables. Data collection was used to validate those findings, lending additional credibility to the continuing importance of this phenomenon. Both personal values congruence and organizational values clarity were significantly related to commitment, satisfaction, motivation, anxiety, work stress, and ethics using a cross-sectional sample of managers from across the same organization set up. Gender, educational level, and functional area did not impact these relationships, although years of experience did make a difference to the finding on the final research processes being done. The term value congruence is generally intuitive when there is a match between employee and organization value systems, positive outcomes will result if the work ethics is put into order. This article will explain the benefits of value congruence, and show you how you can put value congruence to work in your organization.

Introduction

Both individuals and organizations have value systems that dictate their attitudes, behaviors, and the ways in which they allocate resources. Value congruence occurs when the value system of an employee coincides with the value system of an organization.

Job satisfaction is a positive emotional experience associated with one's job. Satisfied employees are more productive and experience less stress than their employers.                            

Organizational identification derives from an employee's sense of belonging to the organization. Employees who feel like they belong are likely to be more committed to the organization, more productive, and more likely to engage in extra role behaviors helping behaviors that go above and beyond the duties of an employee's position. Intent to stay is an employee's intent to remain with the organization over some period of time. Intent to stay is contingent upon both job satisfaction and organizational identification.

Although the link between value congruence and positive organizational outcomes has been firmly established, until recently it was not clear why this process takes place. Rather than directly causing positive outcomes, value congruence primarily leads to positive outcomes through the enhancement of communication and trust between the organization and the employee.

Value Congruence Positive Outcomes

That is, when value congruence between an employee and the organization is high, there tends to be high levels of trust and communication between the two parties. In many cases employees will show positive results when they receive managers boost and motivation which is practically how one manager develops a good rapport with the general employees. One's values is determined by how one approaches his or her work, a good employees always makes sure that his or her performance at work is excellence. But contrary to normal work some employees need to be coerced in order to do the right thing, these entirely depends in once attitude towards the job or the administration of that organization.

It is paramount for any organization to find value addition to their work and also ways to motivate their employees in order to achieve positive results for their company. Values have been associated with job satisfaction, organizational commitment, flexibility to accept changes whenever it is instilled to an organization, job perfomance which is a replica of the effort being applied.

It is important to know the role of values in the growth of the organization so that strategic solution is set to meticate any side factors which arise if such values are not placed in their right place. Values are the core of who really people are, thus if you master their needs at work place and fulfill them without struggle then definitely you will have passed the first hurdle towards work satisfaction.

Some of the most critical decisions made by a manager determine the relationship between customers and the employees. Good manager impacts positive virtues to the employees which lead to positive outcome at end. Values are moderate test which shows the general flow of growth and development of an organizational set up and a determinant for a company to measure success and profitability level over a given period of time, usually it is an annual forecast for any organization to carry out their internal assess of their perfomance.

This depends the kind of working condition given the resources are equitable to the kind of work an organization is doing. Managers' acts as the planners and value setters thus the employees are just the final implementers of what are supposed to do to meet their respective targets.

Practical Implications

Value congruence can be utilized to increase positive outcomes such as job satisfaction, identification with the organization, and intent to stay with the organization. There are several strategies that managers can use to maximize positive outcomes that result from value congruence. Value congruence can be addressed during the hiring process. Match applicant value profiles with those of the organization in order to select employees with good value fit to the organization. Socialize new employees toward the cultural values of the organization.  Incorporate organizational values into new employee training and reinforce them throughout the on boarding period the extended process of assimilating new members into the organization. For current employees, focus on strategies that directly impact trust and communication:

Increase trust by being honest with employees about organizational and supervisor decision-making processes, ensuring that processes such as performance appraisal and distribution of resources are perceived as fair. Increase the benefits that result from good communication by ensuring frequent and open communication between management and employees, and among employees themselves. Throughout various stages of employment, value congruence is a useful concept that managers can leverage to improve positive outcomes for both the organization and employees alike.

When the values represent different organizational units, value level can be determine the extent to which a successful merger can take place between the units Similar effects can demonstrated when comparisons are made between the values of an organization and those of its members. In such cases, value level has been found to indicate overall happiness and satisfaction with the organization.

It has also been significantly correlated with employee performance, commitment intention to remain with the organization, and actual turnover increases. When the values being considered are those of potential employees or applicants, evidence suggests that congruence with the values of an organization will influence whether individuals choose to join that particular organization for the better output capacity. Therefore, this issue has relevance for research on the broader issue of an individual's fit with an organization.

Additional processes can be examined by comparing values or sets of values across different time periods. Because an organization's culture is reflected in the collective values of its employee's cultural change can be assessed when unit or organizational values are compared across two or more points in time. Furthermore, when values at each of these points are compared with the values of potential agents of such change e.g., having new management, a different generation of employees, etc. the locus of change can also be investigated. Similar issues can be explored at the individual level.  That is by:-

Comparing the values of employees across different points in time can indicate their degree of socialization.  As with organizational values, sources of socialization can be examined by comparing employee values at these points with the values of potential socializing agents. (Cooper, 2007)

It is also appropriate to compare values or sets of values between individuals Research has shown that value congruence between employees and their supervisors is significantly related to employee satisfaction and commitment ratings of employees, and supervisors' consideration, success, and competence Interpersonal value congruence is even thought to be an important factor in determining whether people's lives will be altered by chance encounters with other

Despite its wide applicability, there is a surprising absence of research on how value congruence should be conceptualized and measured. The present study examined a number of such issues not previously addressed in this literature. Some have used unsquared indexes, whereas others have used squared indexes. Each of these approaches makes a different assumption about the dynamics of interaction. An unsquared index assumes that a unit difference in values is equally influential regardless of the overall level of value difference.  A squared index gives greater proportional weight to large unit value differences and is consistent with a theory that assumes that individuals dislike large discrepancies between expectation and occurrence, but actually react positively to small discrepancies of this type.

A final issue that has not been treated in previous value studies is the potential for spurious association inherent in certain indexes of value congruence. John's points out that the type of indexes used to measure value congruence can be highly correlated with their component value measures. Thus, an index of value congruence between a supervisor and a subordinate e.g., 'subordinate's value score minus supervisors value score' could be highly correlated with the subordinate's value score. Given such a high correlation, if the index was related to subordinate satisfaction, it would not be clear whether this relationship was attributable to the effect of value congruence or the direct effect of the subordinate's value level. In such cases, the relationship can be clarified by statistically removing the effect of the subordinate's value score from the congruence index.

This study examined four major issues in the measurement of work value ethics:  The effect of different methods of constructing value congruence indexes, the use of general versus specific value measures, the use of actual versus squared indexes, and the effect of correcting indexes for correlation with their component measures.

Significance of Co-Worker Value Congruence

The lack of research in many cases undermines the proper investigation on the subject of workers relationship with one another. Thus, increasing popularity of team based organizational structures. That is why work ethics is important for the employees to make them work in any environment which is conducive and receptive for them. These reasons in general derive from literature on group and interpersonal behavior and research on value congruence, as it is being expounded further in the work.

The senior executives in many cases pay very little attention to the values and beliefs of lower level employees as the former incorrectly believe that peoples culture, organization culture. The findings are helpful to managers as it illustrates that organization members attach values to the organization as a whole, but also to subunits of the organization. Human resource generalists can also gain from the study findings as it builds on the common practice of socializing new employees through planned socialization tactics. (Gray, 2005)

However, there has not been any focus in the literature on whether congruence could change during individuals' tenure with the organization and if certain events could alter congruence. The findings from this study suggest that value congruence is not fixed and that events perceived to change an employee's sense of congruence can have behavioral implications. For a company in an industry as dynamic as commercial airlines, understanding how events could decrease employees' sense of congruence should have paramount importance.

There are also implications for human resource generalists' predictions for employee attrition. The findings supporting multiple types of value congruence indicate that employees may determine congruence based on very different criteria. In making changes to organizational characteristics, caution must be given to not altering characteristics that may be important to employees' values. (Albrecht, 2010)

The following approach is used to come up with the best information in regard to this shift of events. In this approach, individuals have more positive attitudes simply because they interact with similar others, rather than because the organization or leader provides conditions that allow opportunities for value fulfillment.

Although most research to date has examined the sharing of attitudes or personality characteristics, the role of value congruence in interpersonal heterogeneity may in fact be of more importance. Values may be defined as "beliefs about the way an individual ought to behave". As such, values represent core beliefs about what should be done, and are related to a broad network of more specific beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes. Because values are linked to modes of behavior, individuals are better able to predict the behavior of others with whom they share values. Likewise, individuals with congruent values should have greater agreement about what behaviors are important in the workplace Ambiguity and tension associated with working together should be reduced, thus increasing satisfaction and potentially enhancing performance on routine tasks of the type under study here. It provides partial support for these proposed relationships with their findings of relationships between co-worker goal congruence and satisfaction and withdrawal behaviors.

Individuals with congruent values also have a common system of communication. This tends to facilitate interactions by decreasing communication "noise" and reducing stimulus overload. Value congruence may also affect how often people choose to communicate with each other. (Malphurs, 2004) found that similarity in age and tenure was positively related to frequency of communication, and this effect may well extend to value congruence. Alternatively, value congruence may reduce the need for communication in the workplace. As noted earlier, it increases the predictability of the behavior of others and fosters agreement about what behaviors are important in the workplace. Increased predictability and agreement may actually decrease the need for communication in the process of task accomplishment.

Value congruence may also affect interpersonal relationships through its influence on the perception of environmental cues. In a study of perception, (Williams, 2002), found that individuals' work values had a significant impact on their interpretation of environmental stimuli. It is therefore likely that employees with congruent values will place similar interpretations on events in their immediate work environment. Given the relevance of environmental cues for understanding individuals' attitudes and reactions in the workplace, such shared perceptions could remove important sources of disagreement between employees and further facilitate their interpersonal interactions.

Given that research has to date not found entirely consistent effects in the domain of group composition or value congruence, the presence of moderators in the relationships between congruence and work outcomes must be considered. It is important to note that work outcomes extend beyond quantitative measures of productivity to also include performance dimensions important to the organization, such as supervisor ratings of work habits, job-related attitudes, attendance, and coming to work on time. With regard to the outcomes of attitudes and withdrawal behaviors, the literature tends to be somewhat more consistent than for performance, however, much of the similarity-attraction research was performed in the short-term environment of the laboratory. In particular, for these types of outcomes, we might expect that value congruence may not have a uniform effect over time. (Dunn, 2005)

Value Congruence, Work Attitudes, and Attendance

One reason for this wide scope of operation is that values are relatively enduring constructs that describe good virtues of individuals as well as organizations in their own set up. Thus, depending upon the source of various value measures, their comparisons can apply to a wide variety of individual and organizational level phenomena including intra organizational power, cultural change, organizational restructuring, recruiting, socialization satisfaction, interpersonal relationships, work culture and turnover. When the values or sets of values being compared are obtained for different levels of the same organization, value congruence can indicate which organizational units' posses' greater amounts of power and which are most able to define the critical uncertainties for the organization on a given issue which needs to be tackled before it becomes a great problem in the future prosperity of the organization.

Similar effects can demonstrate when the two collateral organizations are made between the values of an organization and those of its members. In such cases, value congruence has been found to indicate overall happiness and satisfaction with the organization.

It has also been significantly correlated with employee performance, commitment intention to remain with the organization, and actual turnover. When the values being considered are those of potential employees or applicants, evidence suggests that congruence with the values of an organization will influence whether individuals choose to join that particular organization. Furthermore, it is paramount when values at each of these points are compared with the values of potential agents of such change that can be investigated. Similar issues can be explored at the individual level when the need arises.  That is comparing the values of employees across different points in time can indicate their quantity of work depends on the effort and support of than whole organization. (Albrecht, 2001)

As with organizational values fluctuates, it is the indicator that one area is not at par with the rest. Thus the need for mutual operation and total overhaul of the organization set up so that the   sources of socialization can be examined by comparing employee values at these points with the values of potential socializing agents. It requires proper measures to be undertaken in order to cope with the challenges discussed on these research paper.

Conclusion

The value congruence in these contents is the great determining factor to measure the level of development of an organization. Thus, unless the whole system functions together nothing good can be achieved in any organization. The future of any organization depends on very well set up plan of work which is a blue print to what each one is required to do in a span of time.

For any organization that records positive growth their secret lies on the attitude they impart to their employees which includes motivation, good salary pay, conducive work environment, well set goals, achievable targets and honesty employees. Therefore, whenever there is no discrepancy always work is performed to the expectation of the employers. Value, thus value congruence is a germ which species up the positive results of an organization.

The study, therefore affirms that there is a crucial need for a value congruence to determine the perfomance level of an organization. In that a positive results comes with the effort applied on value addition measures being mastered across the organizational set up. The emphasis is in how the value congruence in the work place is achieved using the available resources both human and financial resources which are the driving force towards the achievements of the goals.

The information given in these research have put it out well how the value congruence plays a major part in the development of any successful company depends entirely on the management team and all the employees working together for the betterment of their organization without any group dragging another well function body. Thus, it has sent ices on the positive virtues that are required in order to achieve the positive desired results on the organization.

The exercise requires a dedicate team of employees who have positive attitude towards their work and the good relationship they have cultivated together with the senior management and the entire organization as a working entity. This is aspiring to produce best results by creating a decent work environment among their workmates. The best thing that any individual employee can over to the organization is nothing less than the expansion of the organization to create more employment to many people to improve the living standards of all people.