Nailing down your corporate values a valuable - if tough - exercise

CORPORATE values are commonplace. They are stated on corporate literature and easily found on company websites, and give visitors a sense of what is important to the organisation. Stating values is also a way to shape internal stakeholders' understanding of the company and an attempt to influence their behaviours.

Although the values stated may not actually reflect the real culture on the ground, they do represent a "wish list" of what the company wants its culture to be and by dint of drawing up a list, the firm can begin to understand the complexity of its nature. This is especially true for global corporations with diversified markets, and products for which defining the core values can be a useful exercise in clarifying what things are also core to the business.

So does it really matter what list of values a company ends up with as long as it can present "something" to the world? This was one of the questions I was interested in answering in my paper "Evaluating espoused values: Does articulating values pay off?" co-authored with Karsten Jonsen, John Weeks and Tania Braga.