Do Corporate Values Matter?

Excerpt from “Do Corporate Values Make a Difference” on the Customer Think website. (Read the entire story here.)

One researcher has examined these questions. Edward J. Conlon, faculty director of the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership within the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame, studied corporate values by surveying at random the stated values of 150 multinational corporations.

The top ten values Conlon and his colleagues discovered, along with the number of surveyed companies that included the word or phrase:

1. Integrity (111)
2. Concern for customers (62)
3. Respect for all (58)
4. Teamwork (49)
5. Respect for employees (45)
6. Innovation (37)
7. Ownership of actions (31)
8. Excellence (30)
9. Safety (24)
10. Quality (23)

Curious that integrity was so dominant. I wonder what, if anything, companies do to establish and perpetuate that value.

In a follow-on exploratory survey of alumni from Notre Dame’s MBA program, “70% of respondents reported that their employer had a formal values statement, although 27% couldn’t recall any of the values it actually contained. Still, all of the respondents to the survey believed that the company had clear values. And for those reporting a value statement, most felt there was a strong correspondence between the statement and what was truly important to the firm’s managers and owners.

“The survey also included an experiment on the impact of values statements on employee judgments, assessing the extent to which a stated company value affected judgment when that value could be served by favoring some options over others. Overall, the simple inclusion of a value in a value statement didn’t affect decisions respondents made in the experiment. But when a value was frequently discussed with one’s boss, or when it was included in formal performance evaluations, it tended to have a greater effect. Discussions with peers and subordinates, or more casual discussions of values, didn’t have the same impact,” according to a Notre Dame column, Do Corporate Values Make a Difference? (emphasis, mine.)