Values are criteria that people use to evaluate a person's cognition, affect and behavior. The majority of values used at the workplace have a unique variance when it comes to traits. Traits are the core qualities or the basic tendencies someone learned from their peers, parents or family. The values used at the workplace are more malleable and develop through interaction with the specific context and events at work. 

What are values and how do people react to them?

As it is the same as with personality characteristics of an employee, values are an individual difference variable. That's also why values are a guiding principle in someone's life. Also, values are used to change behavior because they are some kind of normative standard people used to choose between behaviors. 

Verplanken and Holland (2002) looked at how values can affect the choices people make. There is a big influence that information and motivation plays in the relationship between values and the choices someone makes. Malka and Chatman (2003) also came to the conclusion that money has an extreme effect on a person's well-being, or so to say; money is relevant for someones well-being. Srivastava, Locke and Bartol (2001) made a scale to assess the different motives people can have for making money; a motive is a reason underlying an individual's choice of a goal. They found that positive motives were neutral in relation to their subjective well-being, and there is a negative relationship between the importance that people attach to money and their well-being. 

Johns (2006) says that there has to be more understanding in how environmental context and events can influence someone's behavior. Context can have a direct effect or can interact with the personality of people. 

How do values work in collectivistic/individualistic cultures?

Triandis (1972) wrote a book Analysis of Subjective Culture where he set out a theory and other psychological methods to study 'subjective culture'. There are, for instance, different values between individualism versus collectivism.

• In collectivistic societies the self is largely interdependent with the group, and in individualistic societies is the self independent of groups. 
• In collectivistic cultures is the goal of the group priority over the goals of individuals and in individualistic societies is the goal of the self most important.
• Cultural norms, obligations and duties are the values that guide behavior in collectivistic societies, in individualistic societies the personal needs and rights are most important.
• In collectivistic societies are communal relationships very important, in individualistic societies people are much quicker in finding a different job when they become unhappy.

There is a necessity when talking about culture and personality and the relationship between them. People who are collectivistic are allocentric, and people who live in individualistic societies are more idiocentric. When an idiocentric person lives in a collectivistic culture often feels oppressed by the requirements they perceive to be imposed on them by the in-group. 

Hofstede (2001) says that values give people a tendency to prefer certain affairs over others. Erez and Earley (1993) developed a 'model of cultural self-representation'. They argued that people want to fulfill values for self-enhancement, efficacy and self-consistency. There are three principles that have something to do with motivation and reward systems:

1. Identify the cultural characteristics of a country that has to do with individualism/collectivism and power distance
2. You have to understand yourself and cultural values you represent
3. Understand the meaning of various practices in different countries.

An axiom in organizational psychology is that there has to be a strong relation between the performance someone shows and the reward someone receives for it. There is also a difference between individualistic cultures and their competition, achievement and personal goals values. In collectivistic cultures the values are more centered around cooperation, interdependence, and group goals. Leung (2001) said that:

• People in collectivistic cultures are busy with positive social identify and this leads to higher levels of in-group involvement that is the case for individualistic people 
• Productivity and performance levels are more homogenous in collectivistic cultures
• Motivational strategies by superiors have more power in high power distance societies
• Negative reactions from supervisors in high power distance cultures and also generate more negative reactions among workers
• People in collectivistic cultures are better to perform in teams than by themselves

A cultural value that researchers find interesting has to do with the sensitivity to power distance, the extent to which the less powerful members of an organization accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. Earley (2002) came up with a three-level construct that he named cultural intelligence. The self-efficacy of someone in social discourse in cross-cultural settings play a key role in effectiveness of such interactions. Nisbett (2003) showed that people in East and West parts of the world organize the world in very different ways; Asians are more prone to context while Americans are more attentive to details and certain objects in an environment. 

The self-determination theory states that people from all different cultures share three basic values: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. If these values are supported by the social context someone will feel high subjective well-being.

There is an implicit hypotheses about how individual differences can influence a person's behavior because it is predicted by traits, values and motives. Cordery (1997) says there are three dimensions of job autonomy: (1) method control about how work is performed, (2) timing control about how someone has influence in scheduling work, and (3) allowing supervisory discretion in setting performance goals. 

Bandura (2001) came with a social cognitive theory. When people believe they are inefficacious, they are likely to take no effort from environments, but when they see their environment as high controlling, that job characteristics are suddenly important to them. The Multimethod Job Design Questionnaire (MJDQ) can be used for assessing the characteristics of a job. 

What is the person-environment fit?

Ferguson was the first to recognize the importance of the person-environment fit. The person-environment fit means that the environment of the employee has a lot of influence and affect on the needs, personality and values of the employee self. But it isn't that the motivation of the job only comes from the function/job self or from the employee. Motivation is and internal and a transactional psychological process and is often the result of the interaction between people and their environment. 

There are often two person-environment fit types:

1. "needs-supplies" has to do with employees values that are met by the work environment. 
2. job-demands abilities is a person's ability that are proportional with what the job requires.

Than, researchers also make a distinction between a complementary fit (fulfill the psychological needs such as job autonomy) and the supplementary fit (such as when the employee and employee's environment are alike). But Edwards (2008) has been critiquing these person-environment theories. Because a major limit of these theories has to do with that it says nothing about the employee's values and his or her perceptions of the values of the organization. 

There is a good person-team fit when the person is intelligent and the team is structured divisionally and when the team must perform in an uncertain unstable environment. But when the environment in which the team acts becomes predictable, the teams structure becomes inefficient. People are constantly the makers and products of their own social systems. The goodness-of-fit models consider the relation between an individual and the environment in which they work. 

A big limitation of the person-environment fit research is that interactions between the person and characteristics of the job or organization are usually treated as stable rather than as dynamic states. 

Bron:

• Summary on Values and how do people react to them (chapter 8) - Latham - 2012