Inculcating company values at Aveng Mining in South Africa

Abstract

This consultation sought to derive the Aveng Mining espoused values as a means to revisit the suitability of the current listed company values and recommend methods of inculcating values into the company. Having underwent a merger the executive board of Aveng Mining is now comprised of post-merger as well as newly introduced executive members. Values form a fundamental part of a company’s culture and both of which are seen as a strong reflection of a company’s leaders. Leaders should therefore have a shared understanding around the company values, hold the same assumptions and have congruent actions for culture to be able to cultivate accordingly. It was found that there is a degree of overlap among the executives of Aveng Mining around what the company behaviours should be, yet there is disparity around how these behaviours manifest themselves into values. Similar scenarios and phrases were used by executives, yet there were occasionally differing beliefs on what constituted these scenarios and phrases. This was further supported when executives were asked to propose new listed company values, the aggregate of which listed 14 unique values. The number of values a company has should be no more than four to six, since any more than this the values will cease to be “core” to the organisation. The derived espoused values, which were based on behaviours rather than stated values, resulted in 4 distinct values that were strongly and congruently held among executives. Only one of these derived values were present in the 14 proposed listed company values. When the derived espoused values were compared to the current listed company values, it was found that only 1 of the derived espoused values were noticeably related to the current listed company values. Interpretations and recommendations were provided in accordance with findings.