When Values Lose Their Meaning – Part 2
This article forms part of a three-part series written by Camille Rabier from 21st Century, exploring the role of values in shaping organisational culture, how they create coherence, and how misalignment can gradually erode it. Part 1 argued that values only become meaningful when they are strategic, operational, reinforced, felt and consistent in principle while remaining contextual in application. This second article examines what happens when that consistency breaks down.
Organisations often operate under the quiet assumption that once values have been defined, communicated and perhaps laminated into a neat poster; desired behaviour will follow. Employees will see the words, internalise the meaning and act accordingly. It is a comforting assumption. It is also usually wrong.
Values do not shape behaviour because they are stated. They shape behaviour when they are repeatedly reinforced through decisions, consequences and leadership behaviour. When reinforcement is inconsistent, employees stop relying on formal values as the primary guide to action. Instead, they look at the evidence – what is rewarded, tolerated, ignored, challenged and quietly excused in practice.
This is not cynicism; it is organisational sensemaking. Weick (1995) describes sensemaking as the process through which people construct meaning from signals, events and patterns. Employees are constantly asking, often without saying it aloud “What really matters here?” and “What is safe, sensible or rewarded in this organisation?”
Schein and Schein (2017) make a similar point in relation to culture – employees learn culture less through formal declarations than through the repeated signals embedded in leadership attention, decisions, reactions, systems and rewards. Put more plainly, culture is learned by watching what happens.
When stated values and observed signals diverge, employees will follow the signal. They have to – signals tell them how to survive, progress and avoid risk. What is not corrected becomes accepted. What is accepted becomes repeated. What is repeated becomes culture.
Over time, this creates what may be described as interpretation drift – a gradual shift in how values are understood and applied across the organisation. Different teams start responding to different signals and building their own local logic of what the value means in practice. The organisation may still share the same vocabulary but no longer shares the same behavioural meaning.
At that point, the organisation no longer has one culture. It has multiple lived versions of culture operating under the same corporate language. This is where fragmentation begins.
Shadow Cultures
When values are not consistently enacted or reinforced by leadership, informal norms begin to fill the gap. These norms are not always written down or deliberately created. They emerge from repeated observation – who gets promoted, who gets protected, whose behaviour is excused, whose mistakes are punished, and which trade-offs are praised.
Chatman and O’Reilly (2016) argue that organisational culture can usefully be understood in terms of norms that, when widely shared and strongly held, act as a social control system shaping attitudes and behaviour. This is precisely why inconsistency matters. If formal values are weakly reinforced, informal norms become the stronger control system.
These informal expectations may begin as practical adaptations, but they do not remain secondary for long. Over time, they become shadow norms – the behavioural standards employees believe actually matter, even when they contradict the organisation’s stated values.
Shadow norms are powerful because they are usually more specific than formal values. “Collaboration” may be printed on the wall, but “do not challenge the executive team in public” may be the rule people actually follow. “Accountability” may appear in the performance framework, but “protect your own department first” may be the behaviour that gets rewarded.
When these shadow norms become consistent within teams or functions, they begin to form shadow cultures. These are not necessarily malicious. They are often rational responses to inconsistent signals. The problem is that they create different operating systems inside the same organisation.
When the Same Value Starts Meaning Different Things
One of the clearest signs of cultural misalignment is when the same value begins to mean different things in different parts of the organisation. The value remains visible in language, corporate statements, performance discussions and leadership presentations, but its behavioural meaning begins to split.
Consider an organisation that claims to value collaboration:
- In one team, collaboration means open discussion, shared ownership and constructive challenge. People speak up, decisions are debated, and accountability is shared.
- In another, collaboration means keeping the peace. Meetings are agreeable, difficult conversations are avoided, and decisions are deferred to preserve harmony.
- In a third, collaboration means alignment with leadership. Ideas are adjusted to fit expectations, dissent is softened, and people learn that being “collaborative” means not disrupting the preferred answer.
In each case, the same value is being used. Yet the behaviour it produces is fundamentally different. What appears to be alignment is therefore often only alignment in language, not alignment in practice. Different contexts may legitimately require different expressions of the same value. A manufacturing environment, a sales team and a research function may not express collaboration identically. That is not the problem. The problem arises when the underlying decision principle changes. If one team uses collaboration to encourage challenge and another uses it to suppress disagreement, the organisation is no longer applying the same value. It is using the same word to justify competing behaviours.
Martin’s (2002) work on organisational culture is useful here because it recognises that organisations are not always culturally integrated. They often contain differentiation and fragmentation – subcultures, ambiguities and competing interpretations. In practice, this means that culture is not simply “what the organisation believes”; it is also what different groups learn, defend and normalise in their own contexts.
Once team-level norms become stronger than shared organisational principles, values lose their coordinating power. People are no longer guided by a common behavioural logic. They are guided by local interpretations of what is safest, most rewarded or least risky in their immediate environment.
The Hidden Cost of Misalignment
As cultural misalignment deepens, the damage is rarely dramatic at first. It appears in small frictions – slow decisions, duplicated work, cautious conversations, inconsistent judgements and the gradual erosion of trust. Eventually, however, several predictable patterns emerge.
- Silos become locally rational – teams prioritise their own norms and objectives because those are the rules they experience most directly.
- Rivalry increases – departments compete for resources, recognition and influence rather than acting from a shared organisational logic.
- Decision-making becomes inconsistent – similar situations are handled differently depending on the leader, team or function involved, creating perceptions of unfairness and arbitrariness.
- Morale declines – unclear expectations create frustration, disengagement and a sense that success depends less on principle than on politics.
- Trust erodes – when values are applied inconsistently, employees begin to question whether leadership means what it says.
Beyond these visible symptoms, a deeper structural shift occurs. Decisions that should be routine begin requiring negotiation. Alignment becomes something that must be actively managed rather than something created naturally through shared understanding.
This is one of the real costs of values losing meaning. The organisation does not simply become less “values-led”. It becomes slower, noisier and more expensive to coordinate. Every cross-functional decision requires translation. Every collaboration carries hidden assumptions. Every disagreement must be navigated through competing local norms.
Execution slows not because employees lack capability, but because the organisation no longer shares a coherent understanding of how decisions should be made. Ambiguity replaces clarity. Coordination becomes effortful. Energy that should be directed towards performance is redirected into interpretation, protection and internal negotiation.
Research on culture and effectiveness reinforces this point. Denison and Mishra (1995) identified consistency as one of the cultural traits associated with organisational effectiveness, alongside involvement, adaptability and mission. O’Reilly et al. (2014) similarly found that culture is related to a range of organisational outcomes, including financial performance, reputation and employee attitudes. The practical implication is simple – culture is not a soft side issue. It is part of the organisation’s operating infrastructure.
Cohesion as Cultural Glue
Cohesion is the underlying glue of a strong culture. It exists when employees share a consistently reinforced understanding of how values should guide decisions and behaviour across the organisation. Cohesion does not mean everyone behaves identically. It means the underlying principles remain recognisable, predictable and trusted.
This distinction matters. Strong cultures do not require uniform personalities, identical communication styles or standardised behaviour in every context. They require consistency in decision logic. People may express the same value differently and still be aligned, provided the principle guiding the decision remains the same.
When cohesion is strong, decisions are faster because principles are shared. Collaboration is easier because behavioural expectations are clearer. Trust is reinforced because people can predict how values will be applied, even under pressure. Teams can operate independently without becoming culturally detached from the organisation.
When employees believe that the same principles apply across teams and leadership levels, they are more likely to contribute discretionary effort, share knowledge and invest in the organisation’s success. Organisational energy is then directed outwards towards execution and performance, rather than inwards towards interpretation and self-protection.
Cohesion, therefore, is not sentimental. It is functional. It reduces ambiguity, lowers internal friction and allows the organisation to operate as a coherent system. Without it, values remain words, but culture becomes a negotiation.
Restoring Meaning
Organisations do not lose cohesion overnight. Misalignment emerges gradually as inconsistent reinforcement allows multiple interpretations of values to take hold. Shared principles weaken, local norms strengthen, and the organisation begins operating less as a unified system and more as a collection of internally competing subcultures.
This fragmentation does not usually happen because values are absent. It happens because values are inconsistently reinforced and differently interpreted. In many organisations, the problem is not that the words are wrong. The problem is that the words are no longer doing any real work.
Rebuilding cohesion does not necessarily require rewriting the values. In fact, rewriting them can become another form of corporate wallpaper if the underlying reinforcement system remains unchanged. What is required is a disciplined return to meaning – translating values into observable behaviours, clarifying the decision principles they are meant to guide, and ensuring that leadership decisions, performance systems, recognition, promotion and consequences all reinforce the same logic.
Values regain meaning when employees can see the connection between what the organisation says, what leaders do and what the system rewards. Only then do values function as genuine mechanisms of alignment and coordination rather than symbolic organisational language.
Part 1 argued that values only matter when they are lived. Part 2 shows what happens when they are lived inconsistently. In Part 3, the question becomes more practical – how do organisations translate values into behaviour in a way that is clear, observable and capable of being reinforced consistently?
