The Role of Corporations in Shaping Employee Values and Behaviour

When forming a company, many entrepreneurs rationally, or even just instinctively, form the nucleus of a company value system and normative code of behaviour. Later, to facilitate transmission during the company growth, these systems and codes become more or less formalized. Together with the compensation and benefits package, they are offered to employees as additional value differentiating one employer from another. Despite the apparent similarity, corporate cultures and value systems differ from each other substantially. The formal value system typically puts forward such virtues as focus on customer, mutual respect, responsibility, trust and profit. The latter is often justified as the precondition of sustainability and growth of the company. These lists of company ‘commandments’ attempt to make behaviour uniform by laying their corporate structure over the employee’s own beliefs and value systems. As long as a company operates in its home country, the similarity of these structures based on common experience of the market and education system is in some way reinforced. Implemented in a different environment, however, this creates tension and a parallel informal hierarchy of values and beliefs.