David M. Mayer explains how to align personal, company values on For the Love of Work podcast
December 21, 2020
Center for Positive Organizations (CPO) research director and core faculty member David M. Mayer discusses “Creating Meaning At Work” on an episode of the For the Love of Work podcast.
The podcast episode examines how we can find meaning and express our values at work. Host Sonia Kang, an organizational behavior and human resource professor at the University of Toronto, talks with Mayer about how to compare our personal values with the values our company enacts.
Mayer encourages employees to ask the following questions to determine whether a company’s espoused values align with its enacted values: “What are the percentage of women and minorities in top management positions or on a board? Do leaders emphasize values when they’re making decisions at work? Can you be someone at the company who’s a total jerk and not a great person and still advance in the company? That’s probably the strongest signal of what the company actually values.”
David M. Mayer is the John H. Mitchell Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Michigan.