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What Would a Value-Centered Organization Look and Feel Like?

Remember, we're talking about an organization that places absolute, and not just utilitarian, value on people. I think the primary characteristic would be a relative absence of fear and anxiety. Since people would be valued in their entirety, their shortcomings, limitations, and even failures would be not only tolerated but accepted. This corresponds to one of the points in Dealing's management system, that which states "Drive out fear" [2]. It also corresponds to the ethos of "celebration of small failures" seen as a common characteristic of "excellent" companies by Peters andWaterman [3]. Employees at all levels of this organization would not experience the stress and strain of having to squeeze themselves into a purely utilitarian behavioral model for 40 to 80 hours each week.

There would, in all likelihood, be less intra-company com­petition, obstruction, and non-cooperation, and more coop­eration and a natural spirit of teamwork. Since people would feel valued for themselves, there would be less need to prove themselves by "besting" or "outshining" others in the company to the detriment of overall company perfor­mance. If the company were truly committed to providing a stable living and reasonable career path for its employ­ees, the employees would in turn be more committed to the success of the company, and more loyal. With a lower level of anxiety, defensiveness, and internal competitiveness, it would probably be an environment of relatively high cre­ativity and high motivation. In one sense, it might be like working in a family business and being one of the family.

These changes might feel risky to executive management, which would be relinquishing to some extent its right to treat people arbitrarily. And it would not be a Utopia by any means; the organization would still have to deal with outside competitive pressures, people would have to do a good job, occasional unacceptably poor performance would have to be dealt with. But it would be a very good place for working humans to spend their time and energy.

Caution: There Are Pitfalls

There are some definite pitfalls to avoid in creating the value-rich organization. The primary danger is probably that of top management formulating a set of values and then "forcing" them on others in the company. This type of practice would be coercive, and evidence of intolerance. It would promote and idealize "groupthink." Of course, since values by their nature cannot be forced from the outside, this would amount to just another instance of requiring people to pretend. And it would be a serious violation of the employees' right to think for themselves, and decide for themselves what is important. Again, since values cannot be either kept out of the workplace or confined to it, this would amount to placing pressure on people to live their lives in certain ways even outside of the workplace, which in our culture is considered unacceptable.

To be Continued