WMBA 6615 Week 3 Espoused Values Comparison Example

Four Published Values Against What the Firm Schedules and Funds: Safety Holds, Client Partnership Holds, Technical Excellence and People First Do Not, and the Rule That Sorts Them

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6615: Building Organizational Culture: Leaders as Architects

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Four Published Values Against What the Firm Schedules and Funds: Safety Holds, Client Partnership Holds, Technical Excellence and People First Do Not, and the Rule That Sorts Them

The Comparison

Cedar Fork Engineering, a made-up North Carolina civil engineering practice of about 340 staff, publishes four values on its careers page. This paper sets each one, quoted exactly, beside evidence of what the firm actually schedules and funds. Argyris and Schön (1974) distinguished espoused theories, what people say guides their action, from theories-in-use, what their behavior shows; the same distinction applies to organizations, and the evidence column below is an attempt to read Cedar Fork's theory-in-use from its calendar and its budget.

Table 1

Published Values and What the Firm Schedules and Funds

Figures from the firm's careers page, finance office and human resources records, 2025; the firm is composite.

Where the Values Hold

Two values hold. Safety is the clearest case. The Monday briefing has survived two reorganizations and several cost reviews, which is the strongest evidence that a practice reflects a real value: it was tested and kept. The firm also pays a full-time salary for safety, and its record shows the result. The reason is not hard to see. A serious injury to a survey crew member would bring liability, regulatory attention and the loss of public clients, whose contracts require safety records. Safety is a value the firm's revenue depends on.

Client partnership also holds. The survey runs every year, the bonus link gives project managers a personal stake and principals are assigned to large clients. Schein and Schein (2017) list leaders' attention, measurement and rewards among the strongest ways a culture is embedded, and client satisfaction gets all three. It, too, protects revenue: public agencies choose consultants partly on past performance.

Where the Values Do Not Hold

Technical excellence and people first are published but not funded. The training budget of about $650 per engineer covers roughly one technical conference every two years. The firm pays licensing exam fees, which cost a few hundred dollars, but not the review courses that help engineers pass. It stopped entering design competitions in 2020 to reduce nonbillable time, and the technical lunch-and-learns ended in 2023. None of these choices is unreasonable alone. Together they show that technical development is expected to happen on the engineer's own time or on billable projects.

People first fares worse, because the gap is written down. The handbook promises a mentor within a month; human resources records show that fewer than a third of 2025's new engineers received one. The firm caps onboarding at eight nonbillable hours and has no time code for mentoring, so a senior engineer who mentors either lowers the group's utilization or does it unpaid. The published value describes an investment the firm's systems are built to discourage.

The Rule That Sorts Them

One rule explains which values hold: a value survives at Cedar Fork when failing at it would cost the firm revenue in the short term, and it fades when its cost is billable time and its benefit is long-term. Safety failures lose clients and invite lawsuits; client dissatisfaction loses contracts. Weak training and absent mentoring cost the firm nothing this quarter. Their costs, slower development, more errors in junior work and turnover among young engineers, arrive later and are not traced back to the decision.

This pattern matters for anyone trying to change the culture. Chatman and O'Reilly (2016) argued that culture is best understood as the shared norms that actually guide behavior, not as stated values, and that norms are shaped by what organizations reinforce. Repainting the values on the careers page will not change Cedar Fork's culture. Changing what the firm funds and measures, for example creating a mentoring time code that does not count against utilization, would.

What a Newcomer Learns From the Gap

The gap between the two columns is itself a lesson for new employees, and possibly the most powerful one. A new engineer reads the careers page before applying, hears the values at orientation and then discovers within a month that the mentor promised in the handbook has not appeared. What that engineer learns is not only that mentoring is scarce but that published commitments at Cedar Fork are negotiable. That second lesson spreads: it makes every later announcement, including any future culture initiative, easier to discount. Closing the gap on even one value, by funding what the firm says it funds, would do more for credibility than any new statement.

Limits of the Comparison

The evidence is drawn from one office, the Raleigh headquarters, and from records I could access as a project manager. Other offices may mentor more or less. The comparison also tests values only through money and time, which may understate commitments that show up in conversation and judgment rather than budgets. Engineers here do care about technical quality and talk about it constantly. What the evidence shows is that the firm as a system does not fund that care, not that its people lack it.

References

Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness. Jossey-Bass.

Chatman, J. A., & O'Reilly, C. A. (2016). Paradigm lost: Reinvigorating the study of organizational culture. Research in Organizational Behavior, 36, 199-224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2016.11.004

Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. A. (2017). Organizational culture and leadership (5th ed.). Wiley.