Maintaining Values Through Performance in Daily Organizational Work

Abstract

A small but growing volume of research identifies values work as the activities through which values are performed in organizations. Despite contributing to overall knowledge about values in organizations, this budding stream of values work literature has yet to offer insight into how collectives such as workplace organizations maintain, or consistently enact, important but abstract values through the concrete, shared daily work of members. The ability to maintain multiple important values has performance implications for employees, organizations and the communities served by organizations. To better understand how organizations (i.e., collectives of individuals working together towards shared outcomes in the workplace), maintain multiple important values in concrete daily work, I conducted a seven-month ethnographic case study of a radiation oncology center as its team members created individual treatment plans for cancer patients. I found that in most cases organizations maintain core values by engaging in the values work of framing work projects as standard and delegating them to a set of standard means that habitually enact core values with little additional work or effort. However, in some cases, salient concerns result in framing concerning project work as an exception to the standard. In these instances organizations effortfully enact adjusted means to resolve the concern and protect core values or accommodate additional, important but non-core values.