Values Conflicts and Dilemmas

Values can come into conflict, and conflicting values, within practitioners or between practitioners and clients, lead to dilemmas about what to do. Sometimes a value is so central and strong that the choice between values is clear and unambiguous, and there is no dilemma. More often shades of gray pervade and the challenge is to balance priorities (either personal or combined with others’) while the “self” (who we are) is operating to help or hinder thoughts, choices, and actions.

Now consider some examples of situations involving value conflicts and ethical dilemmas at the core of an OD practitioner’s worldview and practice: How would you respond? Which of your values and which of your ethics would guide your actions?

1. You are an independent consultant. You have not been selected for the last few projects for which you submitted proposals. Now there is the possibility of work for which you do not have the requested background. You are sure you can do the work and you know you would never be selected if you say you do not have that background.

How would you respond? Which of your values and which of your ethics would guide your actions?

2. You are feeling in a bind. You have uncovered some information that would help your primary client, but if you use it, you will have to violate your promises of confidentiality to others in your client system,

How would you respond? Which of your values and which of your ethics would guide your actions?

3. You are working with a poor community in a different culture on a grant for an international financial institution. You know OD and how to help a client improve processes at all levels, become more effective, and develop potential. However, openness and authenticity are not valued in this culture and self-sufficiency has become a way of life. It is clear to you that the people in this community need to be able to air differences and learn to work together. You feel caught between respecting existing values and intervening to create new behaviors. You have built good relations with your key clients in the community and are responsible to the institution for results.

How would you respond? Which of your values and which of your ethics would guide your actions?

These and other scenarios are commonplace and demonstrate the many different ways that values, values dilemmas, and ethics can impact the practice of OD.

Values as Guides

Some argue that values are “shoulds” that must be universally adhered to. However, this chapter takes the perspective that values are “standards” that practitioners are each responsible for considering based on their own experiences, choices, and reflection.

Values can be thought of as guides—developed over a lifetime of influences, experiences, and reflection. Core values serve as a rudder to steer through varied situations. Values can be adapted and changed over time, based on reflection about life’s influences and experiences. Some values are more deeply held and more a part of one’s core identity, while others are relatively less important, less central, and less fundamental.

The relativity of values shows up in corporations when the greed of a few wins over the satisfaction of many; when CEOs and others increase their own wealth while stockholders lose money and employees are laid off. For example, the ratio of CEO annual compensation to that of the typical worker by 2010 was 243 to 1 (Stiglitz, 2012). It shows up when individuals value justice, but often feel unfairly treated. Or when practitioners believe in equality with the client, yet put up with being treated like a “hired hand.”

Understanding one’s own value hierarchy helps practitioners make decisions, resolve dilemmas, compromise, and stand firm. Values are guides about what to pursue or prefer. Values impact what practitioners want from life (as reflected in purpose or desired outcomes) and how to live life and engage with others (conduct, means). Yet, the reality of the world, circumstances of the moment, and the “self”—who one is—can interfere with, modify or even change the way practitioners live their values.

Values and “Self”

The “self”—who one is and one’s core identity—plays an important role in the work of OD practitioners in terms of their use of self as instruments of change. Values are part of the OD practitioner’s self and values interact with other parts of the “self” in their expression. This interaction can support and strengthen a value, hinder and weaken its expression, or even change the importance the practitioner gives to it (Jamieson, 2003; Jamieson, Auron, & Shechtman, 2010). For example, a practitioner may truly value openness and be able to live that value with most people. But then, with some people, the practitioner may have an overriding fear of losing the person’s affection or approval and thus the interaction becomes less direct and open. Or consider the OD practitioner who has a hard time confronting authority figures and keeps compromising values when “highers-up” push for outcomes or methods that reflect different values.

From another perspective, in a prior study several practitioners were interviewed about “downsizing” in the organizations where they worked. Generally, these practitioners had a tendency to resist downsizing when it was done in response to short-term drops in demand, although most went along with it reluctantly. In two cases, practitioners had values so strong that they protested. They were unsuccessful and resigned because they believed that downsizing would be harmful to the organization by destroying the trust, loyalty, and motivation of workers. Practitioners’ responses to higher management seeking to downsize employees are an example of how practitioner values can conflict with the values of the organizations that employ them.

Values and the Formative Years of OD: 1950s and 1960s

The early, espoused values of OD were humanistic, democratic, and developmental in nature. The emphasis was clearly on human-social aspects as opposed to a technical-production focus. Yet the early OD pioneers had not lost sight of effectiveness, performance, productivity, and efficiency. As Bennis (1969) stated, “More often than not, change agents believe that realization of these values will ultimately lead not only to a more humane and democratic system, but to a more efficient one.” Argyris (1962) further emphasized, “Without interpersonal competence or a ‘psychologically safe’ environment, the organization is a breeding ground for mistrust, intergroup conflict, rigidity . . . which in turn leads to a decrease in organizational success in problem-solving.” French and Bell (1999), in their historic view of organization development, state, “We think most organization development practitioners held these humanistic and democratic values with their implications for different and ‘better’ ways to run organizations and deal with people.”

The earliest values, philosophy, and methods were influenced by findings from the behavioral sciences and leading management researchers who brought the whole person, social systems, democracy, and development to center stage and highlighted their impact on behavior and performance in organizations (French & Bell, 1999). The threads that began to be woven together by early OD pioneers formed the fabric for a new value-set and a different view of organizations. These threads are represented by:

• The early work of Follett (1924, 1942) advocating participative leadership and joint problem-solving by labor and management;
• (b) (b) the later work of Lewin, Lippitt and White (1939) demonstrating that democratic leadership was superior to authoritarian or laissez-faire leadership in affecting group climate and performance and Likert’s (1961) later research showing the superiority of democratic leadership;
• The Hawthorne Studies and their profound effect on people’s beliefs about organizational behavior, including the primacy of social factors on productivity and morale, that whole people come to work with feelings and attitudes that influence their performance, and that group norms have a powerful effect on productivity (Homans, 1950; Mayo, 1933, 1945; Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939). The human relations movement grew out of this work, bringing greater attention to participative management, workers’ social needs, and training in interpersonal skills;
• Lewin’s and others’ work on group dynamics (Cartwright and Zander, 1953; Lewin, 1947a, 1947b);
• The laboratory training movement, spearheaded by Bradford, Gibb, and Benne (1964), taught people how to improve interpersonal relations, increase self-awareness, and understand group dynamics (Schein & Bennis, 1965);
• Rogers’ work that advocated self-responsibility for behavior and growth; supportive, caring social climates; and effective interpersonal communications (Rogers, 1951);
• The later work depicting a range of leadership styles, from authoritative to participative, with varying uses, pros and cons (Tannenbaum & Schmidt, 1973);
• The early work by Trist and Bamforth (1951) demonstrating the socio-technical nature of organizations;
• The new views of the person articulated by Maslow (1954), McGregor (1960), and Argyris (1957), which shifted thinking about the nature of the person/worker, motivation, and the inherent conflict between worker needs and organization needs;
• Burns and Stalkers’ (1961) work on differentiating mechanistic and organic structures and their relevance in different environments; and
• The influence of Katz and Kahn (1966), who first presented the organization as an open system.

From these research and theory contributions, the early values and philosophy of the field were created, leading to radically different strategies and methods for improving organizations and for improving people’s lives in organizations—for example, sensitivity training, T-groups, team building, socio-technical work design, and survey feedback.

Bennis (1969) and Tannenbaum and Davis (1969) provided some of the earliest descriptions of OD values. Bennis (1969) identified a set of OD values and concluded that choice is the central value of OD. Tannenbaum and Davis (1969) focused on the shift in values represented by the new field of OD and provided a more extensive list of values. Both of their lists of OD values are shown in Table 3.1.

Values and the Expanding View of OD: 1970s, 1980s, and Beyond

While the earliest efforts focused heavily on the individual and on interpersonal relations, by the 1980s OD was squarely focused in larger systems from teams to organizations and beyond to communities and societies. Tannenbaum, Margulies, Massarik, and Associates (1985) captured this expanding view of OD from “individuals” to “organizations” to “human systems” and recognized that organizations are human systems and are also subsystems of larger human systems. Experience with “T-groups” and “sensitivity training” showed that individuals can learn about themselves and group dynamics directly from their experience in groups. From this came the recognition that to improve work group functioning practitioners needed to help people who work together and learn together as a group, hence “team building.” From this it followed that the focus needed to expand to include entire organizations, hence “organization development.” And then, beyond organizations, it needed to include all the “human systems” of which societies are subsystems and ultimately our entire global human system.

Thinking of OD in terms of all levels of human systems broadens the scope and complexity of change and compounds the role of values and ethics in our work. With more stakeholders, perspectives, points of view, and agendas, it is often more difficult to determine common good, equity, and justice. Different values often drive different beliefs about what’s ethical. However, it doesn’t change the desire to use OD’s basic values or the effectiveness of changes, consistent with these values, in bringing about sustainable results in all human systems.

While OD is not considered by many to be a formal profession—with clear standards of practice, competencies, agreed values, and a code of ethics—many agree, as first suggested by Dick Beckhard, that OD is a “field of practice” and that OD practitioners operate as a “community of professionals.” There was the sense that emerged during the early 1980s that the community of OD practitioners could function more effectively with clarified values and ethics and shared knowledge and principles of practice. So a project was started to develop a statement of values and ethics for professionals in organization and human systems development (OD/HSD).

This project to develop a “statement of values and ethics by professionals in organization and human systems development” was approached, not as a set of “shoulds” to be imposed on practitioners, but as a resource for practitioners to use to clarify their own values and ethics. The process was initiated by the Organization Development Institute in 1982. Support was given by most of the leading OD-oriented networks, associations, and societies and more than one thousand OD practitioners from around the world. The project involved drafting a “statement,” distributing it for comment, revising it based on the comments, and repeating the cycle of drafting, distributing, and revising more than twenty-five times. The statement has been endorsed as a “working statement” by approximately fifty leaders in the OD community.

Since 1990, the statement has changed little and has been published in both Values and Ethics in Organization and Human Systems Development (Gellermann, Frankel, & Ladenson, 1990) and the Handbook of Organizational Consultation (Golembiewski, 2000). It stands today as the most comprehensive, widely accepted set of values in the OD/HSD field and continues to serve as the foundation of the new International Society for Organization Development’s Code of Ethics (www.theisod.org/code.htm). ISOD is the successor organization to the OD Institute.

Core Values of OD/HSD

Reviewing all of the versions of OD/HSD values identified so far, we identify the core values as follows:

1. Fundamental values
   1. Life and the quest for happiness: people respecting, appreciating, and loving the experience of their own and others’ being while engaging in the pursuit of happiness, conceived as in the Declaration of Independence, namely “a whole life well lived.”
   2. Freedom, responsibility, and self-control: people experiencing their freedom, exercising it responsibly, and being in charge of themselves.
   3. Justice: people living lives whose results are fair and equitable.
2. Personal and interpersonal values (may also be larger system values)
   1. Human potential and empowerment: people being healthy and aware of the fullness of their potential, realizing their power to bring that potential into being, growing into it, living it, and generally doing the best they can, both individually and collectively.
   2. Respect, dignity, integrity, worth and fundamental rights of individuals and other human systems: people appreciating one another and their rights as human beings, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
   3. Authenticity, congruence, honesty and openness, understanding, and acceptance: people being true to themselves, acting consistently with their feelings, being honest and appropriately open with one another (including expressing feelings and constructively confronting differences), and both empathizing with, understanding, and accepting others who do the same.
   4. Flexibility, change and proaction: people changing themselves on the one hand and acting assertively on the other in a continuing process whose aim is to maintain or achieve a good fit between themselves and the external reality within which they live, including other beings.
3. System values (may also be values at personal and interpersonal levels)
   1. Learning, development, growth, and transformation: people growing in ways that bring into being greater realization of their potential, individually and collectively.
   2. Whole-win attitudes, cooperation-collaboration, trust, community and diversity: people caring about one another and working together to achieve results that are good for everyone (individually and collectively), experiencing the spirit of community and honoring the diversity that exists within our global community.
   3. Widespread, meaningful participation in system affairs, democracy, and appropriate decision making: people participating as fully as possible in making the decisions that affect their lives.
   4. Effectiveness, efficiency, and alignment: people achieving desired results with an optimal balance between results and costs, and doing so in ways that coordinate the energies of systems, subsystems, and macro-systems—particularly the energies, needs, and desires of the human beings who comprise those systems.

   (Adapted from Gellermann, Frankel, & Ladenson, 1990, pp. 375–376.)

The original values from Gellermann, Frankel, and Ladenson are listed in Table 3.1 together with other versions of OD values that Burke (1997), Griffin and Minors (2002), and Church (2003) suggested.

The Erosion of Core Values: 1990s

From a strong showing in the formative years (1950s and 1960s) and growth into the 1970s and 1980s, many have expressed concern over the past twenty years that “OD has lost its way” or that “practitioners [have] apparent amnesia regarding the values that underlie the field” (Burke, 1998). As the number of practitioners has grown and approaches have proliferated, some new values have come to guide OD practice. Some contradict and conflict, some undermine, and some just distract from earlier OD values. For example, some values that have proliferated in organizations contradict and undermine humanistic, democratic, and developmental values, including profit over people, dehumanizing practices in downsizing and layoffs versus humane treatment, “doing to” instead of “doing with,” efficiency at all costs, withholding information, manipulation, coercion instead of sharing, involving, or allowing for free choice.

There is no one universally acceptable set of values. So it becomes even more important for OD practitioners to be clear about the value-bases of the choices they make. Church (1996) suggested a duality has emerged in OD and that only two primary value constraints underlie OD practitioners’ work with organizations: (1) fostering humanistic concerns and (2) focusing on more traditional business issues including effectiveness, efficiency, and the bottom line. He concludes that economic pressures and issues are driving clients and the consultants they hire toward economic values, often at the expense of humanistic, democratic, developmental values. In fact, many major corporations (including about three hundred of the Fortune 500) are required by their state-granted charters of incorporation to maximize value for shareholders. Similar dynamics exist even without an economic motive. Senior managers can place higher priority on self-enhancing values over the welfare of other stakeholders. Power, prestige, control, reputation, promotion, and competition for funding can create the same value conflicts and dilemmas as the drive for profit.

This multiplicity of values was present in the beginning of organization development and continues today. Balancing the many sets of values is what has made OD a significant improvement over the prevailing thinking sixty years ago. Perhaps the humanistic, individual focus was over-emphasized. Perhaps others pushed business issues and short-term economic results to an eager audience who pressured for such results. And so the duality became an unrealistic dichotomy—an “either-or” choice, rather than “both-and.”

OD practitioners can resolve many of the differences inherent in the dichotomous either-or, short-term thinking involved in the question of economic interests versus humanistic, democratic interests. The renewed interest in corporate social responsibility, the development of new economic models that include a triple bottom line (Willard, 2002), and the radically optimistic notion that business can be an agent of world change suggest that the economic and humanistic perspectives are not fundamentally incompatible. Resolution of the apparent conflict between these views is essential for grounding organizational effectiveness in authentic human commitment, rather than coerced compliance. True value conflicts will always exist as long as people and situations continue to differ. Yet, better results can be produced by not creating dichotomous thinking out of competing values. Polarity theory (Johnson, 1996) teaches that natural polarities exist everywhere and require managing the tensions and balancing actions to achieve most of the upsides and minimize most of the downsides of those polarities.

Renewed Interest in Values: 2000s

A resurgence of interest in values has emerged in recent years, in much the same way OD formed—as a response to prevailing undesirable trends. People are being right-sized and reengineered; short-term economic indicators have become the Holy Grail; optimizing one organization at the expense of others has become common practice; short-term success and profit are overshadowing environmental deterioration and resource depletion. Values such as spirituality and community are gaining voice, sustainability is increasing, and many human potential/personal development values are reemerging. Many in OD are re-asserting core values or yearning for their return. OD is a field that must struggle for balance among often-conflicting values and manage inevitable pendulum swings.

Participants at the 2001 OD Network Conference joined in a value identification exercise about what they thought was the most important value to focus on in the coming year. The results are reported in Table 3.1. Participants identified: authenticity, respect/diversity, honesty/integrity, balance, presence, learning/growth, community/inclusivity, compassion, live large, faith, and courage (Griffin & Minors, 2002).

Subsequently, a project was launched by the ODN to identify current values operating in the field through the use of scenarios with focus groups across the United States. This effort resulted in an extensive summary of values/principles (Griffin & Minors, 2002) and a draft statement of Principles of Practice (Church, 2003). Extracting the value statements from this work produced the following values seen as important to the participants in this project: authenticity/openness, respect/diversity/inclusiveness, integrity/ethics, collaboration, democratic processes, empowerment, self-awareness, and confidentiality (Church, 2003). These values are also listed in Table 3.1 along with the other lists of OD values described earlier in this chapter.

The statements of OD values shown in Table 3.1 were developed over more than a forty-year time period. While there are some differences among the lists, the high degree of similarity is striking. These similarities suggest that there have always been central values that differentiated OD from other ways of managing and changing. That does not mean these values always operate. Individual practitioners make choices that support or undermine them. As years of OD practice and changing organizational environments have unfolded, many of the original values have eroded for some practitioners and been strengthened for others.