A Tale of the Half Full or Half Empty Cup: Core Values in Local Government Organizations in Practice

Abstract

Scholars argue that core values must operate throughout an organization’s layers to support that organization’s performance and legitimacy. Yet, little evidence exists—especially at the local level—on whether public managers work to infuse core values throughout their units and on whether such efforts trickle down through these organizations. This article reports suggestive evidence on these questions from original interviews and surveys with leaders and staff in two North Carolina local governments. Leaders report taking several steps to weave core values into their units; however, subordinates report uncertainty about these values, impeding their application in the organization’s work.

Keywords

core values local government public management

Organizations invest substantial resources in developing and articulating core values. Leaders subscribe to the considerable literature indicating that employees can draw upon not just personal values, but organizational values, when acting and making decisions in the workplace (Collins and Porras 2002; Kotter 2011; Kouzes and Posner 2012; Schein 1985). Scholars widely argue that, for such behaviors to occur, core values must be not just passively stated but integrated throughout an organization’s layers (Boyatzis 2011; Goodsell 2011; Kernaghan 2003; Lennick, Kiel, and Jordan 2011; Schein 1985; Selznick 1957; Waters 1988).

Yet, little research examines how local government managers and employees view and use core values in practice, or how local government leaders take tangible steps to infuse core values throughout their units. This article broaches this literature gap by taking two local governments in North Carolina as case studies to gain insight into core values integration. Specifically, it examines four research questions suggested by the literature:

Research Question 1: Do local government managers and employees see core values as relevant in practice?

Research Question 2: Are local government managers and employees aware of core values in practice?

Research Question 3: Do local government managers and employees know how their organizations’ core values were developed?

Research Question 4: Do local government managers model and use core values in practice?

In addition to contributing to research on how core values are integrated into public organizations, this article appears to be one of the first—albeit work by Nalbandian (1991, 2006)—to examine how managers and employees engage with core values in local government.

After briefly discussing the literature related to each of the four research questions, this article describes the results from original interviews and surveys that were conducted to investigate these questions. It concludes with key themes and recommendations for practice.

Literature Generating the Four Research Questions

The four questions studied in this article derive from four themes in the academic literature on core values in public and private organizations.

Research Question 1: Relevance of Core Values to Managers and Employees

An organizational “value” is “that which consumes agency resources and attention; that which significant numbers of agency members feel is important and work to serve; that which agency members acknowledge is powerful; and that which executives, legislators and managers create structures and hire people to serve” (Buchanan and Millstone 1979, 268). Research suggests that the integration of core values into a public organization can shape the organization’s performance in two key areas: employees’ decisions and workplace norms.

Regarding decision-making, public service values can influence public managers’ decisions (Arinder 2016; Belle and Cantarelli 2017; Destler 2016; Getha-Taylor 2009; Lavena 2016; O’Leary and Gerard 2014; Witesman and Walters 2015). Likewise in private businesses, “values such as trust, fairness, and respect for the individual can greatly improve the quality and accuracy of communication, the integrity of the decision-making process, and management’s ability to evaluate personnel and projects” (Badaracco and Ellsworth 1989, 74).

Regarding norms, “[o]rganizational goals…. direct, justify, and drive coordinated (or cooperative) behavior” in a workplace (Wright, Moynihan, and Pandey 2011, 208). Critically, employees’ own values may not alone ensure that an organization delivers public value; instead, organizational core values can shape the ways in which personal values intersect with the organization’s work to produce outputs (Belle and Cantarelli 2017; Raile 2012).

Research Question 2: Awareness and Practice of Core Values across the Organization

Research on what sorts of activities integrate core values into the corners of an organization offers two clear answers: (1) communication and reinforcement of values by leaders throughout the ranks of the workplace and (2) reinforcement of the core values in organizational systems and processes. Such communication and reinforcement can happen through several managerial actions. One “especially strong foundation for integrating values into public service” is an organizational “values statement” that “express[es] values that are shared at all organizational levels—combined with the dispersal of leadership roles throughout the organization” (Kernaghan 2003, 711). Separately, organizations can consciously foster conversations about values or morals with employees to ensure that managers are not “morally on their own” (Waters 1988, 178). Such conversations can occur during performance reviews, presentations by the legal department, through the presence of task forces who review organizational practices with an eye to ethics, through staff groups that lead discussions about salient incidents involving value failures in other organizations, and through managers leading “deep sensing” sessions where they encourage employees to share concerns (Waters 1988). Organizations can also integrate core values into their processes of employee recruitment, selection, orientation, training, and evaluation (Boyatzis 2011; Jurkiewicz and Bowman 2002; Paarlberg and Lavigna 2010).

Research Question 3: Ownership through Involvement in the Development of Core Values

Literature suggests that core values are more likely to inform an organization’s routines if employees understand and have even contributed to core values’ development. For instance, Lyons, Higgins, and Duxbury (2010) note that “building a shared culture of excellence requires an understanding of the nature of work values, their various types, and how these types fit together as a system” (p. 998). Furthermore, it is important to ensure that employees have a clear understanding of organizational goals and the connection between these goals and the core values of the organization (Wright, Moynihan, and Pandey 2011). In other words, it is important for organizations not just to state core values on a regular basis but to take steps to ensure that employees understand their contents and origins.

Research Question 4: Modeling of Core Values by Leadership

Finally, a key aspect of value communication lies in the behaviors of an organization’s leaders (e.g., Goodsell 2011; Schein 1985). Transformational leaders both “inspire employee effort by raising their awareness of the importance of organizational values” and “model behaviors that reinforce that vision” (Wright, Moynihan, and Pandey 2011, 207, 212). Effective leaders act as “both exemplary models of values-based behavior and skillful practitioners of the art of values management” (Kernaghan 2003, 711). In short, leaders who successfully infuse values into their organizations “‘walk the talk’” (Greenbaum, Mawritz, and Piccolo 2015 as quoted by Downe, Cowell, and Morgan 2016, 907).

These four themes certainly have relevance to local governments. Yet a review of the literature in major public administration journals shows little study of local government leaders’ efforts to push core values through their units—Nalbandian’s (2006) work perhaps being the main exception. This article aims to address the relative absence of local government in the values literature by reporting findings from interviews and surveys of both managers and employees of local governments in North Carolina. The results help to delineate the types of management styles and internal tools that local governments can use to push core values into their day-to-day behaviors and shed light on the challenges local government practitioners face in acting on their core values.

Data Sources

The results derive from case studies of the two largest local government agencies in southeastern North Carolina: the City of Wilmington and the County of New Hanover. In those venues, an exploration of core values in practice was conducted in three phases from 2012 to 2014.

The first phase consisted of structured interviews with a small sample of well-informed and connected local managers and an online survey of local executives in the local government and nonprofit sectors. The interviews focused on three questions: Do core organizational values matter, are such values present, and, if so, how does an agency integrate these values into decisions and behaviors? The interview subjects included the executive director of the Cape Fear Council of Governments (CoG), a management consultant and former deputy New Hanover county manager, the Wilmington city manager, a group of ten local government managers at the quarterly CoG meeting, and seven department heads of the local government of Burgaw, North Carolina. (Burgaw, North Carolina, has a population of 4,060 with a manager–commissioner form of government. The town manager oversees nine departments and 67 positions.) The phase 1 survey was completed by forty-six managers in total, comprised of sixteen government managers, twenty-four nonprofit executive directors, and six faith-based nonprofit managers.

The second phase consisted of more in-depth personal interviews with twenty-two members of the executive leadership teams of the two largest government agencies in the region. Access to the management teams of both agencies was critical, and their size and structure has broad comparability beyond the region. For example, there are sixty-three cities nationwide of comparable size to Wilmington (population within ± 10,000) and forty-eight counties comparable to New Hanover (within ± 20,000). Wilmington has a council–manager form of government, and the city manager oversees twenty departments and 993 employees. New Hanover County has a commissioner–manager who oversees twenty-seven departments and 1,745 employees. These agencies are useful initial laboratories for testing ideas and determining the salience of core values to practitioners; that is, is the idea of values-based decision-making relevant to organizational life at the local government level, or is it merely an interesting academic topic, a nice subject for stimulating conversation but of little use in the pressures of getting the job done?

To drill down to explore organizational practices below the executive suite, the third phase consisted of online (e-mail) surveys (using essentially the same set of questions as listed above with an additional question asking them to name the values) of the entire staff population of the two agencies (with a pen and paper survey administered to city employees who did not have access to the online survey). Of the 1,000 total employees in the City of Wilmington, 301 or 30 percent responded to at least some part of the survey; 78 or 26 percent were direct supervisors, 57 percent staff, and 14 percent other. Of the 1,500 New Hanover County employees, 303 or 20 percent responded to the survey; 15 or 5 percent were department heads, 73 or 24 percent were direct supervisors, and 207 or 68 percent identified themselves as staff, and 8 or 3 percent as other. Note that in the county, department heads and supervisors are at an organizational level below the executive leadership team who were the subject of the in-person interviews. In the city, department heads are considered part of the top leadership team so were included in the interviews.

Results

Research Question 1: Do Local Government Managers and Employees See Core Values as Relevant?

Key finding

Local government leaders clearly see core values as relevant but also see challenges in integrating these values in day-to-day organizational life.

Local government managers made it clear that the topic of core values is highly relevant to their organizations. For example, the Burgaw department heads were clear that while the town does not have a written set of core values, there is an “unwritten code that permeates the culture” of town government. The Fire Chief (pers. comm., February 3, 2014) noted: “…when you work for a government entity, there is a certain culture there that drives the values. I see that here…the culture here breathes the core values. While they are unwritten, you really know what they are.” The values mentioned included respectful communication, teamwork, service to the community, and integrity. To give another example, a manager commented on the necessary, continuous effort expended to discuss and align their current core values with the focus of a newly elected body (CoG Managers, pers. comm., October 29, 2012). These responses resonate with Goodsell’s (2011) and Schein’s (1985) observations on the need to “imbed” or “infuse” core values in the culture of the organization.

The topline results from the phase 1 online survey with local city/county managers and executive directors of nonprofit agencies at least on the surface further support the conclusions that core values exist in these organizations and that employees perceive them. For example, 93 percent of respondents indicated that their organization has a set of written or unwritten values that guide decision-making, and 91 percent responded that decisions often reflect their organization’s values. While one would frankly expect such responses from managers, they also report working to communicate values—as through staff meetings (83 percent), Web sites (59 percent), and wall hangings (39 percent)—all behaviors discussed further in the next section. Such actions align with academic arguments that managers must continually reinforce values (e.g., Argyris and Schön 1988; Raile 2012). Quotes from open-ended survey questions also signal the importance that local government leaders give to core values, one example being the remark that:

Values-based decision making can be very valuable in cutting through the often conflicting practical, financial and philosophical interests of individual and group stakeholders.

That said, interviews and the phase 1 survey also highlight managers’ challenges in integrating core values into their organizations’ work routines. The executive director of the CoG suggested, much like Waters (1988), that conflicts between core values and other motivations are a very real part of organizational life, particularly with politically driven boards or commissions (C. May, pers. comm., October 2, 2012). The retired county deputy manager observed that a clearly articulated set of core values as a guide to how an agency accomplishes its mission is a great benefit but a “hard sell” amid daily work life (A. Atkinson, pers. comm., September 28, 2012). One local government manager commented that “working under an elected body that changes every two years is a particular challenge, as their set of core values may have a different emphasis from the existing set” (CoG Managers, pers. comm., October 29, 2012). Interviews also revealed the existence of overarching goals other than formally espoused core values. Confusion over which values to emphasize or how they align—even among managers—almost certainly impedes value integration.

The topline results from the phase 1 online survey indeed reveal gaps in core value integration. For instance, 65 percent of leaders indicated that they integrate values into job descriptions, 63 percent into training and development, 52 percent into performance appraisal, 46 percent into selection criteria, and 22 percent into awards. While these numbers are nontrivial, one could argue that if core values are truly part of an organization’s culture, they should be more prevalent in critical decision points such as the screening of job candidates, performance evaluation, and criteria for awards (e.g., Belle and Cantareli 2017; Downe, Cowell, and Morgan 2016; Kernaghan 2003; Paarlberg and Lavigna 2010; Waters 1988; Wright, Moynihan, and Pandey 2011).

Research Question 2: Are Local Government Managers and Employees Aware of Core Values?

Key finding

Nonmanagers appear less aware of core values than managers, and one reason appears to be that efforts to integrate core values into organizational layers are less consistent than managers may believe or desire.

As noted above, managers take several actions to try to weave core values into their workplaces. The county manager appeared to make a particularly concerted effort to tie discussion of important issues back to core values at the time of the interviews. The director of strategy and policy for the county stated:

Values are communicated on the internal and external website…. We have them on screen savers. We talk about them in blogs, and video pieces about what they are, how they work, and we are providing examples in action and showing how they will help get us where we want to go. They are discussed in staff meetings and at the strategy council meetings. The County Manager and the leadership team define the values on the blogs. Staff can add and comment. Over time, we have had more involvement and comments. We are now beyond sunshine and rainbows. This is a good thing.

Yet, employees on the whole appear less aware of core values—and certainly of core value integration efforts—than leaders. While a high percentage (87 percent) said that their organization has a set of values to guide decision-making, in a separate question that asked respondents to name the values, only 16 percent of the 509 who answered this question named all five values and only another 20 percent named at least three. If employees cannot name the values, one must wonder whether the ideal of an institution “bathed in values” (see Selznick 1957 as discussed by Goodsell 2011, p. 7) is occurring.

Asked how values are communicated within their department, the most common answers among employees were Web sites (53 percent), staff meetings (44 percent), wall hangings (38 percent), and screen savers (37 percent; respondents could choose multiple answers). The fact that only 44 percent of employees listed meetings (vs. 83 percent of leaders as noted above) suggests that this form of reinforcement happens less, or is less effective, than managers perceive. Asked where values are visible in their department’s systems, employees most frequently mentioned training and development (55 percent), performance appraisals (47 percent), job descriptions (36 percent), and awards (33 percent). Twenty percent indicated they were not aware of values being visible in any of the systems. The one area where there was a noteworthy disparity between the city and county responses was the visibility of values in awards (54 percent for the county and 12 percent for the city). This difference reflects overall slightly higher responses for county employees on the visibility of values in systems, likely the result of a new county manager trying to make his imprint on the culture.

When seeking to understand why staff may be unaware of values despite managerial value communication activities, one consideration is that there appears to be inconsistency in core values integration efforts. To give one example, awards systems seem to be used unevenly. To give another example, several leaders mentioned integrating values in job descriptions, but there was little clarity about how this was done across various departments. Respondents noted that selecting people with the right values is as important as technical skills for a job, but a city leader noted it is easier to evaluate the integration of a measurable value such as safety than to evaluate whether prospective employees share values such as respect and professionalism. The following statement from the city human resources director is illustrative:

[Values] are not reflected in job descriptions. In the executive performance appraisal, the values are looked at more. We are judged as to how well we have demonstrated them and adhered to them. Yes, in the top leadership, yes. But not throughout the organization….We are working on putting together a supervisory training this year and values will be a piece of that. Trying to instill the culture and show how core values can be used in many facets.

Research Question 3: Do Local Government Managers and Employees Know How Their Organizations’ Core Values Were Developed?

Key finding

Among both the city and county leaders, there is a lack of clarity about how core values were developed. A large number of staff do not know where core values come from.

The majority of city leaders did not have a clear idea of how the values were developed. Several said that the values came after the city manager was hired. Three others mentioned that the city council developed six focus areas and has attempted to integrate them with the core values. The importance of a shared understanding of values’ source is evident from the following quote:

Citywide—they have their own set of core values. I am not confident that they are stakeholder based. That is problematic. [The City Manager] gathered a bunch of people a few years ago. He pulled information from this book, some from this video, and some off of a piece of paper. I told him unless people can own this they will struggle with it. It needs to speak to them because the end put is derived by them. We were wrestling with the context and the content because it is not ours. (Wilmington city fire chief)

The county response was also indicative of uncertainty among local leadership about the core values’ source. Three new hires indicated that they were not sure how the values were developed. Others said the core values came from the strategic plan between the county commissioners and senior staff but questioned the level of collaboration.

Similar to the responses from the executive teams, by far the most common response among first-line supervisors and staff when asked how core values were developed was “don’t know or unsure” (174 responses), followed by “culture/pass down from top to bottom” (48 responses). This question was also left unanswered by 27 percent of the respondents.

On the whole, these findings resonate with Lyons, Higgins, and Duxbury’s (2010) arguments about the importance of a shared understanding among employees of how work values fit within the overall system.

Research Question 4: Do Local Government Managers Model and Use Core Values in Practice?

Key finding

Managers report that they try to model core values, but nearly half of the staff say that they see core values reflected in organizational decisions occasionally, rarely, or never.

Leaders’ remarks suggest that they work to model core values in their own behaviors:

We can’t just preach to the organization without actually living these out ourselves. As managers, the biggest…that’s what has the most influence within the organization. That is what they see. If they see us doing it also, then they believe what we say. (county assistant manager)

We do live the values every day. In meetings, we reflect how things line up. We try to find ways to make sure our communication is holding up to our values…. The employees don’t see the follow through from leadership, so then they think it is just the flavor of the day.(Wilmington city fire chief)

Leaders also appear to believe that core values are often reflected in their organization’s daily activities. Two of the leaders indicated that they see core values reflected all the time or daily in their organization, and twelve responded often or frequently. And while some answered the question of how often core values figure in daily activities with comments such as “it depends on the area” and mentioned politics, institutional inertia, and budget constraints as impediments to enforcing the values, fourteen of the twenty-two executives said they often see values reflected in decision-making.

Nonmanagers, however, appear to see core values used in practice less often. Asked how often decisions reflect their organization’s values, 54 percent said often, but fully 46 percent said occasionally, rarely, or never. Asked in an open-ended question about other ways that they see organizational values as evident, about 224 total employees noted that they see values at work in day-to-day operations, teamwork, and open communication, but another 53 specifically noted that they see actions contradicting the core values or being inconsistent.

These findings in total resonate strongly with literature that suggests that leaders must model values in their behavior for core values to take hold (Downe, Cowell, and Morgan 2016).

Conclusions and Recommendations for Practice

Given the significant amount of research supporting the importance of core values’ integration in public organizations, the findings reveal several key themes and lead to four recommendations for public managers.

Core Values Matter and Are Worth Investment of Time and Resources by Leadership

The concept of core values is not an abstract academic concept in the local government practitioner world. Although the degree to which the values are formally written down and visibly present varies, the city and county studied had both been actively discussing core values at the time of the research. While it was not clear how much attention was paid to aligning department-level values with city-level core values, the major department heads had clearly taken steps to develop values tailored to their functional areas. Some of these values include “do the right thing and take care of your people” (cited by the city police chief) or citizen engagement (cited by city planning and transportation director). Although only a few of the manager interviewees could name the core values immediately from memory, there was a general sense that these values are not just on screen savers but are part of the regular conversation.

Recommendation #1: Make core values a part of the imbedded conversation of organization life, particularly when key decisions are being made. Leaders must model the way. As one manager stated, “If the values are off in the corner somewhere, mission drift can all too easily happen.”

Ambiguity over Source and Alignment of Core Values Undermines Integration

The plethora of terms related to values from multiple sources of authority (e.g., elected councils or commissions, boards of directors, multiple management levels) appears to breed confusion over the definition of the terms and how they align. Indeed, in the case of the city, some department heads studied were much more focused on their own set of values than any citywide values. Employees may be asking themselves, “which ones do we prioritize”? The interviews also revealed very little understanding—even among leaders—of how the core values in the local organizations studied here were developed. For new and incumbent leaders, there is an opportunity to enhance buy in to the values by engaging the workforce in the development of a new set of core values or in a reaffirmation of existing values that were developed in the past.

Recommendation #2: Consult with elected officials and department heads to ensure alignment between values-oriented languages that may exist from multiple sources, so that employees are receiving one clear message.

Recommendation #3: Actively involve employees at all levels in the development of core values and periodically revisit to ensure buy in and prevent erosion of the power of the values over time.

The Presence of Core Values in Key Agency Systems Is Both Critical and Difficult

Managers seek to integrate values in agency systems but struggle to weave core values across and down the organization. Compared to management, staff are less aware of core values and more likely to report that they are occasionally, rarely, or never seen in organizational decisions. However, this in-depth examination of two government agencies reinforces the findings from the literature that core values will only take hold if they are visible factors in all key agency systems, such as in the type of employees who are selected, how they are appraised and rewarded, and if they are a serious part of the discussion during staff meetings when decision are being made.

Recommendation #4: Conduct an inventory of agency systems and engage in frank discussions with agency managers to evaluate the visibility of core values in the daily life of the organization.

As a potential tool for managers who seek to act on these recommendations, Figure 1 recaps key ways in which local governments may try to reinforce and integrate values through all levels of the organization. Figure 1 also underscores that these activities needs to be done in the context of organizational leaders modeling core values through words and action.

Figure 1.

Integration of core values.

While the case studies reported on here may not entirely generalize to other local governments, the conclusions drawn here from those case studies resonate with key arguments found in the academic literature—particularly speaking to the need for managers to take steps to weave core values throughout their organizations (e.g., Goodsell 2011; Schein 1985; Selznick 1957) by grounding critical decisions in core values (e.g., Belle and Cantareli 2017; Downe, Cowell, and Morgan 2016; Kernaghan 2003; Paarlberg and Lavigna 2010; Waters 1988; Wright, Moynihan, and Pandey 2011), by ensuring that employees understand how organizational values inform the organization’s work (Lyons, Higgins, and Duxbury 2010), by continually reinforcing values (e.g., Argyris and Schön 1988; Raile 2012), and by continually modeling core values in their own actions (Downe, Cowell, and Morgan 2016). The results offer optimism regarding local government practitioners’ recognition of the relevance of core values but suggest that local government managers may need to devote additional personal attention and agency resources in order to effectively integrate core values beyond the executive suite.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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