Your Personal Values – Where Conflicts can Occur

Personal Values Conflicts

A personal values conflict occurs when we experience something that contradicts one of our strongly held values. As behaviours are very aligned to values, we’ll often experience a values conflict when we experience a behaviour that goes against our values.

We can usually get a bit of a sense that this is happening when our emotional responses to a behaviour feel or seem a bit disproportional to the behaviour itself.

Two simple examples that might help to bring this to life are when:

• Someone gets very frustrated if someone else is late to a meeting, or
• Someone gets very frustrated if they hold the door open for someone and the recipient of the kindness does not say thank you.

These are both really simple examples of fairly minor instances where a person’s personal values might be challenged or threatened by someone else’s behaviours, resulting in a visceral and disproportionate emotional response.

While the two small examples we’ve explored above occur at an interpersonal level, in our experience values based conflicts can take place at multiple levels, which we reflect on below:

Internal (Intra-personal) values conflicts

Internal values conflicts occur when we hold two or more personal values that are in conflict with each other. When this happens, and we feel that a course of action we are taking must go against one of our values, then we’ll typically experience a moment of frustration, anger, anxiety or lack of congruence.

A simple example could be an individual who has strong personal values of both kindness and honesty. If this person finds themselves in a situation where they are asked for their opinion on something that they think wasn’t good, then they typically have two choices:

1. They can lean into honest and share their true thoughts (which could go against their value of kindness), or
2. They can lean into kindness and share a redacted version of their thoughts (which could go against their value of honest).

Regardless of which option the individual chooses to take, they will almost certainly be left with some lingering negative feelings as at least one of their values will have been conflicted to some extent.

The more we are clear of our values, and the order of their importance to us, the easier it is to navigate situations like this. That said, it’s worth noting that some work on values assumes that the ordering of importance of our values actually changes based on different types of contexts (See the card sort activity in the learning more section of this post).

Inter-personal values conflicts

Inter-personal values conflicts occur when we engage with another person who behaves in such a way as to threaten or go against one of our values. This is the type of values conflict that most people think of when they first start to explore the topic.

These types of conflict are pretty common in the world. It often helps to remember that an individual’s values are partly the product of their life and cultural experiences, so we might experience more of this sense of values based conflict when we spend time with people from other cultures.

In the example at the start of this post we explored timeliness and noted that values conflicts can exist in relation to it. This is a great example of potential cross-cultural personal values conflicts as there are known differences in how people feel about time across different cultures.

Another simple example of an inter-personal values based conflict could be to do with the quality of a piece of work. If one person really values getting something done quickly (but isn’t too concerned about perfection), and another person highly values quality, then a values based conflict could occur.

Within a group of people

Values based conflicts can often occur between sub-groups within a larger group. We can think of some of the polarisation that is occur in some western societies at the moment as a form of values based conflict between subgroups. This societal level is not our area of interest, so we won’t explore it further.

We can, though, also experience intra-group values conflicts like this within organizations. This is the type of thing we’ve seen more commonly after a merger or integration. When this happens, the legacy cultures of the two merged groups can still remain strong, creating a bit of an “us and them” feel in the newly combined organization. This, in turn, can lead to recurring values based conflicts between the two sub-groups.

With an organization

Organizations can also be the source of a values based conflict. This can typically occur in two ways. An individual can feel in a values conflict with an organization (often the one they are working for), and organizations can have values based conflicts with each other. 

In some instances individuals working for an organization will be placed in a position where they are asked to do something that goes against their core values. These moments are really uncomfortable and can cause an individual to feel powerless, complicit, conflicted and unhappy.

A simple example could be that an individual holds a strong value around loyalty and wants to be loyal to their clients, but an organization is having a drive to exit low margin clients. If this happens, the individual may be forced with withdraw a service from someone in need, which would go against their values.

Many other examples of values clashes like this exist, and this does all verge into the area of ethics.

It’s worth noting that there can also be values clashes between organizations, which can lead to dysfunctional relationships and ineffective working partnerships. This occurs in some joint ventures, as well as in some customer and supplier arrangements.

So what do we do with this knowledge?

In our view, the main thing we can do with this insight is to develop an awareness of our own personal values and strive to work in line with them while accepting that some form of values conflict is almost bound to occur whatever we do and developing the skills to navigate these conflicts as well as possible.

Self awareness is one of the keys to being able to predict where values based conflicts will occur and, loosely, we think emotional intelligence is the framework best suited to helping us learn to navigate them well when they do occur.

Understanding our personal values is a key part of understanding our motivation, developing our self-awareness and developing our character. Rokeach’s value survey may help you further in exploring your values. We also like this little (external) tool on values – Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Values Card Sort – by Meeting Point Counseling. 

Our personal values may influence our career anchors as well as our career drivers.

Having a clear understanding of our values is also essential if we are to embody authentic leadership.

Our ability to navigate the unhelpful thoughts and feelings associated with values conflicts might be helped by developing our emotional intelligence.

You can learn more about personal values in our podcast on the subject:

Personal values are often things that we hold very strongly, sometimes without even being aware that we do so. Because they are held so strongly, when something happens that threatens or contradicts them, it can really be jarring. This is something we’ve experienced ourselves, and something that we see fairly often when working with clients.

Helping people understand their values as well helps them find more congruent roles and navigate their lives and work more effectively. Similarly, helping individuals and teams understand the nature of values based conflicts can help them better predict when they will occur, and better navigate them when they inevitably do occur.

We note, though, that not everyone has the ability to work for organizations that align with their values. It’s often a bit of a privilege to have the ability to choose a path of employment. This is something we also note in relation to “purpose”, which is kind of similar to values alignment.

As an aside, we sometimes find that the root causes of visceral friction in teams is the result of some form of values conflict. Helping teams discuss and explore their personal values is a useful way to preempt and mitigate these risks, while also strengthening team connections and self-awareness.

We have no specific references for this, it’s based on our experiences of working with clients.

If you are aware of specific sources for this topic that we should cite, please do share them and we’ll amend accordingly.

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