Wearing Values Lightly or Living Them Deeply?

The Dance Between Personal and Organisational Ethics

In contemporary organisational life, values have become a kind of currency, to be printed on mission statements, vinyls stuck on to walls, and voiced confidently at induction days. Yet, behind this rhetorical familiarity lies a more complex, unresolved question:

What are values, and how do they operate in the interplay between personal conscience and institutional identity?

To explore this, we might begin by asking: are values like clothes, chosen to suit a setting, or are they closer to a second skin, inseparable from the self, enduring across time and place?

Or perhaps they are something stranger still: half-inherited, half-chosen, and only truly revealed and strengthened in the tension between conviction and circumstance.

The Illusion of Fixed Values

Much of modern leadership discourse assumes that values can be fixed, coherent, and transferable. We’re told that individuals should be “values-led” and that organisations ought to “live their values.” Yet this assumption often masks a deeper truth: values are not stable possessions but are better understood as living commitments that emerge through relation and context. As Charles Taylor (1989) notes, values are embedded in “webs of significance,” always interpreted through cultural and historical lenses.

What’s more, the idea that values can be universally codified, immutable across time, place, or person, can be more coercive than clarifying.

When organisations articulate a set of ‘core values’ as non-negotiable, they risk substituting conformity for integrity. This creates a culture where people wear values like uniforms, suppressing the dissonance that might otherwise lead to growth, questioning, or innovation.

Conformity or Plurality?

This raises a second question: do we really want everyone in an organisation to share the same values? At first glance, the answer seems obvious; surely alignment makes for harmony. But such harmony is often achieved at the cost of diversity, creativity, and ethical depth. Iris Marion Young (1990) warns against what she calls the “ideal of impartiality,” which smooths over difference and silences dissent in the name of common purpose.

Values pluralism, on the other hand, recognises that different people may hold divergent but equally valid commitments. Rather than seeking uniformity, organisations might do better to foster ethical dialogue, a space where conflicting values can be explored without fear. This calls for what Joan Tronto (1993) names as an “ethic of care,” rooted not in abstraction but in attentiveness, responsibility, and responsiveness to others in specific contexts.

Organisational Culture in an Era of Polarisation

These questions become even more urgent at a time when social and political values are increasingly polarised. Whether in debates over immigration, climate policy, or the role of the state, we see a rising tension between values of individualism and selflessness, liberty and security, progress and tradition. Organisations do not exist outside these debates; they are implicated in them, both as actors and as communities of meaning.

In such a landscape, the temptation is to double down on values as boundary-markers, signalling virtue or allegiance. Yet a wiser response might involve cultivating values not as fixed identity claims but as evolving practices of relational negotiation. Values such as honesty, care, courage, and justice are not simply asserted; they are enacted in and through the messiness of lived organisational life.

A Practice-Based View of Values

Perhaps then, values are less like clothes and more like musical instruments: tools of expression that require tuning, care, and skilled use. This analogy invites a shift from “value alignment” to “value attunement”, not everyone playing the same note, but listening closely enough to play in harmony. Minor keys only serving to deepen the melody. Such a shift echoes Alfred North Whitehead’s (1929) process view of reality, in which coherence is not imposed from above but arises through ongoing patterns of relating and becoming.

For leaders and organisations alike, this means resisting the lure of simplistic value statements. Instead, they must foster reflective practice, story-sharing, and the kind of dialogue that welcomes friction as a site of ethical discovery. As values continue to shift across the wider culture, organisations that can live with complexity, rather than retreating into dogma, may be the ones best equipped to contribute meaningfully to the common good.

Conclusion: Living Values Together

Values, then, are not scripts to be memorised or costumes to be worn. They are the living expressions of what we care about, emerging at the intersection of self, other, and world. To ask people to abandon their personal values for the sake of organisational alignment is both ethically suspect and strategically shortsighted. And yet, to ignore the shared values that can bind communities together is equally dangerous.

The challenge is to create organisations that are less like factories of sameness and more like ecosystems of ethical practice, spaces where values are neither imposed nor hidden, but continually explored, negotiated, and lived. In such a space, care might take precedence over compliance, and integrity might mean not agreement, but the capacity to remain in relationship across difference.

References

Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tronto, J. (1993). Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge.

Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and Reality. New York: Macmillan.

Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.