The values held by people affect both their perceptions and the ways they react and made decisions in response to conditions encountered in the organizational environment. The concept of value has several distinct meanings. To many, a value seems to be synonymous with attitude, an attitude being a predisposition to act in a certain way. An attitude is a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through the process of experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon an individual's response to all objects and situations with which he or she is related (Schermerhorn, Hunt, & Osborn, 2002).
Perhaps more basic than an attitude, or even underlying attitude, a value is a type of belief, centrally located within one's total belief system, about how one ought or ought not to behave, or about some end-state of existence worth or not worth attaining. Thus, a value is both a predisposition to act (attitude), and an estimation of the worth of an action (Ashkanasy, Falkus, & Callan, 2000).
Value is an important construct in nearly every branch of social science, as well in philosophy, theology, and education. The many and varied uses of the construct make definition difficult. Value is a more abstract construct than attitude. Values may express either personal or social preference, and they may serve either as ends or as means to ends (Winter, 2000).
There is general agreement that values cause attitudes, according to Mueller (1998), but there is "not a one-to-one relationship between particular attitudes and particular values. Rather, a single attitude is 'caused' by many values รน by one's whole value system, in fact" (p. 5). Through the application of a body of theory generally referred to as consistency theories, investigators have attempted to discover the relationships among beliefs, feelings, and behavioral tendencies. Chief among these consistency theories is the theory of cognitive dissonance. Accordin...