Corporate Managers and Their Potential Younger Successors: An Examination of Their Values*

Zusammenfassung

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Human values are individual characteristics that vary in importance and serve as guiding principles in a person's life. The purpose of this paper is to identify the values held today by Slovenian managers and students and contributes to the few studies that have examined the influence of age on values. The exploratory study comprises 130 managers and 118 students majoring in management. The managers highly value health, family happiness, honesty, freedom and wisdom, whereas the students perceive as the most important good friends, knowing oneself health, freedom, loyalty and family happiness.

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Auszug

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Corporate Managers and Their Potential Younger Successors: An Examination of Their Values*

1. Introduction

Values are prescriptive or proscriptive beliefs intimately linked with the self, organised into relatively enduring hierarchies of importance (Rokeach 1973) and strategic lessons learned through the course of life. The purpose of the paper is to identify values among managers in Slovenia and business students (with aspirations to become managers) and examine differences in values with regard to age, as one changes his/her values through the course of their lifetime (Rokeach 1973; Musek 2000). Rokeach and Ball-Rokeach (1989) argue that it is crucial to compare value systems between individuals, as well as age groups and national cultures.

It is important to identify the values held by managers as their stimuli perceptions are filtered and interpreted by means of values that, in turn, influence decisions about the »way things are done« in the company, and send a message to wider society regarding what is important and desired. The decisions managers make today will impact the lives of generations of tomorrow. Further, managers serve as role models and as such set an example of which behaviour (and values) is acceptable in the corporate world and society. By giving invited lectures at business schools they shape students' attitudes and may even impact their values. Society needs to be aware of students' values since some of today's students might later become corporate executives. Thus, society needs to know who they are, what they believe in, and which life roles they value. The paper's structure follows its purpose. The second part provides a definition of values, followed by value-behaviour relations and a discussion of the impact of age and professional socialisation on values. We then present values in Slovenia in the light of its national culture. In the third par...

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