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Understanding a Value Centered Organisation

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UNDERSTANDING A VALUE CENTRED ORGANISATION
K P Gopalkrishnan
Assistant Professor HR and Business Ethics
Pillai Institute for Management Studies and Research
Panvel – gopalpuru@rediffmail.com This paper attempts to clarify what is meant by value centred organisations since increasingly the word value is being used by Human Resource professionals to delineate their prognosis. To remove the fuzziness this paper takes a definitional stand and gives the HR professional a working idea of this highly abstruse subject – a subject on which divergent views expressed by a number of authors has managed to confuse many a reader. More often than not it boils down to my views for the rest of society-right or wrong. This is a sad commentary and …show more content…

When an organisation accepts the subjective connotation of value and acts thereupon it is called a value-based organisation. Oxfam, Centre for the Advancement of Philanthropy, and the Reliance Group are good examples of this variety. When an organisation accepts the objective connotation of value and acts thereupon it is called a value driven organisation. The A V Birla Group, the Tata Group and the Godrej Group are good examples of this variety. However when a corporate house (or even an educational institution or a cooperative society) is both value based (ethical) and value driven (positive) it is said to be value centred. And this is the kind of corporate house any good HR intervention will seek to achieve. Is it any wonder that names like Tata, Godrej, Infosys and Wipro stand out like beacon lights in the Indian corporate world purely because of the value centred leadership at their helm?
Conventionally, the idea that the activity of business is essentially morally neutral and that ethical value must be imposed from outside the activity itself has gained wide credence and acceptance. Business is expected to meet certain external criteria, derived from the prevalent/dominant moral philosophy in society if it is to gain wide acceptance and be deemed legitimate by the society in which it functions and operates. This reluctance to accept the intrinsic morality of

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