Managing Values – Ethical Change in Organisations

Citation

Griseri, P. (1999), "Managing Values – Ethical Change in Organisations", Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 14 No. 2, pp. 172-172. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmp.1999.14.2.172.1

This book has a very broad canvaas, as exemplified by the title. The audience appears to be post‐experience management course participants, e.g. MBA, and the content is in part based on issues and incidents given in confidence to the author by managers and MBA programme members.

In three parts – “Understanding an organisation’s values”, “Agreeing and changing values” and “Maintaining an organisation’s values”, the author covers a very wide range of issues from “discovering people’s values” to “how stakeholders learn an organisation”s values.”

Each chapter ends with a few questions to prompt reflection and discussion of the issues plus a list of notes referring to key references and any points of clarification.

The very wide range of references used, for example, Belbin on teams, Honey and Mumford on learning, Hofstede on culture and Berne on transaction analysis, reinforce the feeling of breadth rather than depth.

However, examples of mini‐cases from real‐life examples in organisations are scattered throughout the book to illustrate the points made.

The overall effect though is not one of coherence. Many important points are raised about the complexity of values and the “myth of shared values” in organisations but these are then dissipated somewhat by a foray into “personal moral skills” which seems to skate over a wide range of theory or moral behaviour, ethics and cognitive processes. The role and use of organisational politics is not mentioned at all.