Definition
Organizational values are guiding principles or ideas in any organization shaping both internal practices and relationships with external stakeholders. These principles or ideas might be explicit as in a mission statement or implicit as enacted in day-to-day practices.
Introduction
The purpose of this entry is to provide an overview of organizational values by exploring the question “What does it mean to say that an organization has values?” In so doing, it addresses the status of organizations as moral agents – that is whether or not it is appropriate to speak of organizational values at all – by surveying applicable US Supreme Court cases and recent theoretical work. Next, several common perspectives on the meaning of values in an organizational context are presented, and a discussion of how organizational values are manifested by explicit espousals and embedded in the enactment of organizational policies...
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Hanks, E.K., Hanks, J.C. (2016). Organizational Values. In: Farazmand, A. (eds) Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_41-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_41-1
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