The Emergence and Development of Organisational Values

Organisational values have long been regarded as a taken-for-granted term. OV research tends to focus on the content of OV, by regarding values as static facts, leaving a significant gap in examining how values manifest throughout organisational interaction. This study aimed to examine three types of values, which are espoused, enacted, and embedded values, and how they emerge and/or develop in organisations; to understand how people make sense of OV throughout their interaction. Using an inductive qualitative methodology, the data collected mainly via interviewing diverse organisational members vertically and horizontally in a Saudi company. Integrating sensemaking approach to investigate the social processes of OV emergence and/or development, the results showed that values emerged and or developed in the organisation through two mechanisms: values match and mismatch, through it, sense-giving, and sense-seeking were the two main sensemaking activities. The results highlighted that both social interaction and personal values are key factors that influence the emergence and/or development of OV. The study contributed to existing OV research by providing a holistic understanding of OV by answering four questions of ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘how’, ‘why’, as a starting point encouraging more research that takes a holistic approach to studying OV.