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1. Introduction
The study of employee attitudes and behaviour in management has occupied researchers’ agendas for decades (Porter, 1995). As the human relations era, researchers and practitioners have gone to great lengths in their attempt to understand what makes employees happy and motivated at work. The main motive behind this interest is the assumption that employees who are happier at work are more productive (Judge et al., 2001). However, as Schein (1980) has long argued, human beings are influenced by numerous factors, which ultimately make the study of employee attitudes and behaviour a daunting task. Nevertheless, academics have made notable research progress in identifying and exploring the factors which influence attitudes and behaviour at work (Giauque et al., 2014). Many antecedents relate to the work environment, such as pay and supervision, while others concern the personal characteristics of an individual, such as values, moods, and emotions (George and Jones, 2011). In this paper, the focus will be on the role of personal values in employee behaviour and attitudes. Although values can refer to work values, our prime focus is on “personal values”. The former refers to values that are more related to work than to other aspects of an individual’s life, and is defined as “beliefs about the desirability of specific outcomes of working” (Hattrup et al., 2007, p. 481). On the other hand, personal values are broader and tend to produce a wide range of behavioural and attitudinal outcomes across an array of different life domains (Rokeach, 1973).
Academics have been particularly interested in the field of personal values given the role values are thought to have in shaping attitudes and human behaviour (Finkelstein et al., 2009; Fritzsche, 1995; Fritzsche and Oz, 2007; Ismail, 2016a; Rokeach, 1973). Based on the social adaptation theory, personal values are a type of social cognition that help an individual adapt successfully to his or her environment (Kahle, 1983). As the most abstract types of social cognition, personal values reflect the most basic characteristic of adaptation which ultimately influence attitudes and behaviours respectively (Homer and Kahle, 1988). Indeed, many empirical studies have demonstrated a significant relationship between personal values and a variety of attitudinal and behavioural outcomes across many disciplines, including health, education, politics and...