How values backfire

This paper combines organizational values and attribution theory perspectives to develop a process model explaining how emphasizing values can inadvertently harm employee satisfaction. To do this, we theorize how employees make sense of leader actions in values-driven organizations. Consistent with psychological research on evaluation, we suggest first that employees automatically appraise leader actions as either positive or negative. Second, drawing from theories of attribution and blame, we argue that employees will be motivated to attribute a dispositional cause for leader actions appraised negatively against the values essentially an attribution of hypocrisy. This attribution, in turn, generates strong negative emotions, akin to betrayal. Third, the threatening nature of this makes employees unlikely to question it proactively. This process model is grounded in data from a longitudinal study of a small advertising firm. Qualitative data are analyzed to show how these three steps can unfold along anegative pathway we call the hypocrisy attribution dynamic. We speculate that value clarity, persuasive sensegiving, and psychological safety can mitigate the hypocrisy attribution. By delineating how organizational values can make leaders vulnerable to the attribution of hypocrisy and by illustrating how this process can adversely affect efforts to manage according to values, this paper contributes to the literatures on organizational values, social cognition, and organizational learning.