Whose responsibility is it to address anomie: a leader’s, a follower’s or that of the whole organization? It is the responsibility of all stakeholders to ensure that core values are shared but the primary responsibility of the Leader to make it happen. In a Leader-Follower relationship, shared values reinforce commitment and trust.

How do successful leaders address this? They work at building consensus on basic values because this is what knits together the leader and follower relationship. Based on the famous idiom, “As you sow, so shall you reap”, it is important to understand that values need to be sown in order to reap the benefits of employee commitment, high performance and productivity.

As per Wikipedia, there are 3 important characteristics of Values:

1) Values are developed early in life and are very resistant to change. Values do not rise out of what people tell us, but as a result of how they behave toward us and others.

2) Values define what is right and what is wrong indicating that values are intrinsic and do not involve an external code to tell us what is right and wrong.

3) Values themselves cannot be proved correct or incorrect, valid or invalid, right or wrong.

The word ethics originates from the ancient Greek word “ethikos” or “ethos” and date as far back as Plato and Aristotle. Values are the foundation of followers and ethics are the habits or conduct by which they operate. Ethics result from actual behavior and determine how a leader’s decisions are made. Ethics guard our human relationships and values sit at our core as our code of conduct. Values are already possessed by individuals even before the start of their relationship with their followers or leaders. Ethics, on the other hand, are the collective shared values of connected relationships which constitute the norms of a culture within the organization.

Adapted from Rick Pfohl‘s blog Significance of Values and Ethics in Leadership.