Organisational Excellence

Chapter 4: Driving excellence with organisational values

How essential are organisational values in facilitating the drive for excellence?

Values are an essential component for organisation excellence. They represent a core ideology. This ideology includes values plus a common purpose. Their essentiality is that they are enduring tenants and they keep the consistency of purpose intact and will not create destruction from the long-term perspective at the expense of short-term expediency.

Figure 4.1: Organisational vision

Core values are the raisin d’être and they are the perpetual guiding star on the horizon insofar as organisations are concerned. The model depicted above (Figure 4.1) contextualises the importance of organisations and beliefs, together with the purpose, values and the guiding philosophy.

The vision of the organisation is dictated by the environment in which it operates; there are different ways of evaluating culture and values as Figure 4.2, overleaf, depicts. Core values form the nucleus when depicting organisational culture, which is a simple answer to the question ‘this is the way we do things around here’.

Figure 4.2: Culture and values

The different layers of culture-concerned organisations can be assessed in terms of: status; power; structures; the routines of how things take place; the work climate; the language used for communication; the success stories; the systems and processes; and the reward and recognition system, etc.

Organisations can also be assessed from the point of view of value impact being at the level of becoming a philosophy through to inculcation.

The European Centre for Best Practice Management has, over the years, benchmarked best practice in values and their inculcation. Figure 4.3 depicts ten core values that were found to be emphasised by world-class organisations. There are values that are linked to customers, the quality of the work and the work environment in the form of people and teamwork. Other...