Employee Values and Value Congruence: Foundations, Nature, and Future Directions
Creators: name: Abbasi, Zoleikha
Publisher: name: University of Wollongong
Year: 2025

description: This PhD by Compilation thesis focuses on the nature and importance of employee values and value congruence in organizational settings. It was designed and delivered as a three-study project with each study written up and submitted to peer-reviewed journals separately. The central question of this thesis is “What is the contemporary nature of value congruence and incongruence in organisations?” In order to answer this question, an integrated model of congruence/incongruence of different types of value (work values, political values, and cultural values) and possible outcomes (positive and negative) was developed. This model framed and guided the three studies and the findings of the studies supported all pieces of the model. Overall, the main contribution of these studies is to reveal unconscious role of employees’ value congruency and incongruency in the decisions related to their employment (e.g., recruitment, promotion, exit).Study one is a systematic review of the similarity-attraction hypothesis (SAH) in the workplace which has been shown to exert an influential role in guiding employees’ behaviour. The review analyses 45 empirical studies of SAH. The results showed that although SAH holds in most workplaces driving employees’ attitudes and behaviour, it is a relatively weak force that can be suppressed by economic, social, and legal forces. Also, the review revealed a very low number of longitudinal studies into SAH, which is important as the SAH theory is predictive in nature of the theory. The review also showed that empirical studies of SAH far outweigh empirical studies of the alternative dissimilarity-repulsion hypothesis (DRH). Typically, studies of SAH in the workplace only measure one type of value, although there are many competing forms of value in organizational settings such as work values, cultural values, and sociocultural values which employees carry in their personal and work life. The review also highlighted the role of demographic similarity in the primary stages of relationships to bring people together (e.g., during recruitment and selection) and psychological similarity is pivotal over more lengthy periods and therefore comes more to the fore in during long-term employment. The review also demonstrated that there is a paradox at the heart of value congruence and incongruence in workplaces. Whereas employees may have a fundamental desire to be amongst people similar to themselves, many organizations want, and have a legal requirement, to be inclusive and operate with a diverse workforce in which everyone feels comfortable.In the second study, I explored how multiple types of values interact and whether congruence and incongruence might be two separate factors influencing positive or negative outcomes. This second study is a conceptual piece that presents an integrated model of three types of values (work values, political values, and cultural values) to create a new heuristic model of values that can be used to predict organizational outcomes. It argues that value congruence is underpinned by the “similarity leads to attraction” hypothesis and value incongruence is underpinned by the “dissimilarity leads to repulsion” hypothesis. According to this conceptual model, factors producing employee value congruency relate to positive organizational outcomes and factors causing value incongruency relate to negative organizational outcomes. Also, the model argues that individuals do not evaluate value similarity and value dissimilarity unidimensionally, but these are two distinct dimensions reinforced by different theoretical hypotheses.In the third study, I focus on one element of the model developed in the second study, political value incongruency, and explore how it is manifested in neo-normative organizations (i.e., those advocated diversity and inclusivity agendas) with many employees hiding their political values and pretending to accept and follow organizational values as a strategy to survive. To illustrate the importance of this strategy, I looked at what happens when those with extreme political values that are antagonistic to those of the organization are revealed to hold these views. I studied the reactions of neo-normative organizations in the USA when their employees were revealed to be right-wing extremists by taking part in the riots at The Capital on 6th January 2021. All of these employees were summarily dismissed usually before any due process or any charges were laid against them. At the same time, the dismissal rate for employees working in non-normative organizations is less than 10%. This result suggests that in these extreme circumstances when their values are put under the spotlight, neo-normative organizations’ control of employees’ values is stretching into their personal and political lives. Not only does this demonstrate the increasing surveillance of employees by value-driven organizations, it demonstrates the importance that employees with values different to those of the organization are forced to mask them or risk dismissal. The thesis begins with an introduction on values and value congruence and ends with an exegesis that draws threads together from across the three studies.