The stimulus of European Union accession on the personal values formation process: a study of Croatia and Slovenia

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the change in the personal values orientations of individuals in Croatia and Slovenia resulting from the countries’ accession to the European Union (EU). We examined business managers’ and professionals’ value orientation by using four individual-level higher-order dimensions of self-transcendence, self-enhancement, openness to change and conservation, as defined in Schwartz’s value theory. To capture the effect of EU accession, we examined employees’ values orientation before accession to the EU (Croatia N = 276; Slovenia N = 389) and after each country’s accession (Croatia N = 223, Slovenia N = 336). This study reveals a substantial impact of this major socio-political change on the individual value-formation process. The value-formation of Croatia and Slovenia poorly follows manifested EU common principles and shared values, where Slovenians have more aversive look at the EU integration, then Croatians, what can be assigned to ‘initial enthusiasm', as Croatia entered almost decade later. The identified ‘EU integration gap' warns that accession to the EU is more associated with reaping economic benefits than with aligning the country’s values with those emphasized by EU integration. The findings have important implications for value management in the EU, single countries, and organizations.