Value Attunement: Exploring the Potential for Responsible Executive Decision Making

As mentioned in the Introduction, society increasingly expects corporations to respond affirmatively to a wide variety of social concerns (Butler, 2001; Grace & Cohen, 1998). This expectation is consistent with the origin of the business corporation as a creation of government to be held accountable for serving the public interest (Waddell, 2000). Yet this institutional mission has become increasingly complicated as large corporations operate across the globe and small firms develop worldwide stakeholder networks (Vidaver-Cohen & Altman, 2000). Faced with such complexity, it is difficult for corporate leaders to know how to proceed. Their hesitation is not helped by the widely-held fallacy, addressed in Chapter 2, that values — or normative beliefs about right and wrong — are subjective preferences that cannot be identified and analyzed (Frederick, 1986; Treviño & Weaver, 1994, 1999, 2003). Given this fallacy, it is not surprising that many executives place low priority on integrating policies of social responsibility into organizational cultures and core business practices (Birch & Batten, 2001;Milne, Owen & Tilt, 2001). Accordingly, they may downplay social issues, unless the values at stake just happen to coincide with their own personally held beliefs (Swanson, 1999). And even this ‘value coincidence’ may be uncommon (see Birch & Batten, 2001).