Value Conflicts in the Workplace: Towards a Typology of Workers’ Experience Lessons from Qualitative Research Among Management Accountants
(2025) Journal of Business Ethics : Entrepreneurship, Governance and Ethics — (2025)
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- Abstract
- While the literature acknowledges the existence of value conflicts in organizations, the way such conflicts arise and are experienced by workers has not yet been thoroughly analyzed. Drawing on the analysis of the life stories of twenty-four management accountants, we elaborate a typology consisting of four types of value conflicts: ‘dis-alignment’, ‘disagreement’, ‘discrepancy’ and ‘dilemma’ (4Ds Typology). This typology sheds light on the genesis of value conflicts, on their main features, as well as on the way workers ‘respond’ to them without necessarily trying to ‘cope’ with them. This article makes a twofold contribution. Firstly, it replaces the logic of incongruence between personal and organizational values, which characterizes much research, within an analysis that highlights the importance of the conflictual dimension underlying the relationship to values in organizations. Secondly, it emphasizes the fundamental plurality of value conflicts in the workplace: the similarities and differences between these types of conflicts are examined closely to highlight the specificity of each. Overall, this article sheds new light on the analysis of values within organizations, clarifying their role in people’s experiences and managerial decision-making.
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Scola, C., & de Nanteuil, M. (2025). Value Conflicts in the Workplace: Towards a Typology of Workers’ Experience Lessons from Qualitative Research Among Management Accountants. Journal of Business Ethics : Entrepreneurship, Governance and Ethics. Submitted. (Original work published 2025)