Instrumental values, also known as means values, refer to the beliefs and principles that guide individuals in their actions and behavior. These values are considered instrumental because they serve as a means to achieve certain desirable ends or outcomes. In other words, instrumental values dictate how individuals should conduct themselves to attain their goals and fulfill their intrinsic or extrinsic needs.
Distinguishing Between Instrumental and Terminal Values:
It’s important to distinguish between instrumental values and terminal values. Terminal values represent the ultimate goals or desired end-states that individuals aspire to achieve, whereas instrumental values pertain to the means or methods employed to reach those goals.
Example:
If someone values “honesty” (instrumental value), they may view it as a means to achieve the terminal value of “integrity” or “trustworthiness.”
Significance of Instrumental Values
Instrumental values play a pivotal role in shaping human behavior, interactions, and decision-making in various ways:
1. Guiding Principles:
Instrumental values serve as guiding principles that help individuals determine the appropriate course of action in different situations. They provide a framework for ethical and moral behavior.
2. Conflict Resolution:
When individuals encounter conflicts or dilemmas, instrumental values can help them make decisions that are consistent with their personal beliefs and principles. They act as a compass for resolving ethical or moral conflicts.
3. Social Cohesion:
Shared instrumental values within a society or community contribute to social cohesion and harmony. When individuals collectively uphold values such as “respect” and “cooperation,” it fosters a positive and cooperative social environment.
4. Personal Development:
Instrumental values play a role in personal development. They guide individuals in their quest for self-improvement and becoming better versions of themselves.
5. Leadership and Management:
In leadership and management roles, instrumental values influence decision-making and how leaders interact with their teams. Leaders who prioritize values such as “communication” and “empathy” are likely to create more positive work environments.
Examples of Instrumental Values
Instrumental values encompass a wide range of beliefs and principles. Here are some common examples:
1. Honesty:
Being truthful and transparent in communication and actions.
2. Respect:
Treating others with consideration, dignity, and courtesy.
3. Integrity:
Upholding moral and ethical principles, even when faced with challenges.
4. Empathy:
Understanding and sharing the feelings and perspectives of others.
5. Responsibility:
Taking ownership of one’s actions and obligations.
6. Cooperation:
Working collaboratively with others to achieve common goals.
7. Accountability:
Acknowledging and accepting the consequences of one’s actions.
8. Courage:
Facing challenges and difficulties with bravery and determination.
9. Adaptability:
Being open to change and flexible in response to evolving circumstances.
10. Patience:
Demonstrating tolerance and perseverance, especially in challenging situations.
11. Communication:
Effectively conveying ideas, thoughts, and information to others.
12. Ambition:
Setting and pursuing ambitious goals and objectives.
13. Empowerment:
Encouraging and enabling others to achieve their full potential.
14. Tolerance:
Accepting and respecting diverse perspectives, beliefs, and cultures.
15. Gratitude:
Recognizing and expressing appreciation for the kindness and support of others.
How Instrumental Values Shape Behavior
Instrumental values influence behavior in several ways:
1. Decision-Making:
When individuals face choices or dilemmas, instrumental values guide them in making decisions that align with their beliefs and principles. For example, a person who values “honesty” is more likely to choose the truthful option in a situation.
2. Conflict Resolution:
In situations where conflicts arise, individuals rely on their instrumental values to navigate the conflict and seek resolutions that uphold their principles. Values like “empathy” and “communication” can facilitate constructive conflict resolution.
3. Relationships:
Instrumental values impact how individuals build and maintain relationships. People who prioritize values such as “respect” and “cooperation” tend to form healthier and more positive connections with others.
4. Leadership and Management:
Leaders and managers often exemplify instrumental values in their actions and decisions. Leaders who value “responsibility” and “accountability” set examples for their teams and foster a culture of accountability within their organizations.
5. Personal Growth:
Individuals use instrumental values as a framework for personal growth and development. They work on cultivating values like “ambition” and “adaptability” to achieve their goals and overcome challenges.
6. Ethical Behavior:
Instrumental values are closely linked to ethical behavior. They guide individuals in making ethical choices and behaving in ways that align with moral principles.
Challenges in Upholding Instrumental Values
While instrumental values are integral to ethical and moral behavior, individuals may face challenges in consistently upholding these values:
1. Conflicting Values:
In some situations, individuals may encounter conflicts between their instrumental values. For example, the value of “honesty” may clash with the value of “loyalty” when revealing a colleague’s wrongdoing.
2. External Pressures:
External pressures, such as workplace demands or societal expectations, can sometimes lead individuals to compromise their instrumental values in favor of expediency.
3. Moral Dilemmas:
Moral dilemmas can test an individual’s commitment to instrumental values. In situations where there is no clear “right” choice, individuals may struggle to make decisions that align with their values.
4. Cultural Differences:
Cultural norms and values can differ significantly, leading to challenges in understanding and respecting the instrumental values of individuals from diverse backgrounds.
Conclusion
Instrumental values are an essential aspect of human behavior and decision-making. These values serve as guiding principles that influence how individuals interact with others, make choices, and navigate life’s challenges. Instrumental values play a significant role in shaping ethical behavior, fostering positive relationships, and contributing to social cohesion within communities and societies.
While individuals may face challenges in consistently upholding their instrumental values, recognizing their importance and striving to align actions with these values can lead to more ethical, meaningful, and fulfilling lives. By understanding the significance of instrumental values and their impact on behavior, individuals can navigate complex ethical dilemmas, build stronger relationships, and contribute to a more just and harmonious society.
Key Highlights:
Definition: Instrumental values are means to achieve desirable ends or outcomes, guiding individuals in conducting themselves to fulfill their intrinsic or extrinsic needs.
Differentiation from Terminal Values: Terminal values represent ultimate goals, while instrumental values pertain to the means used to achieve those goals.
Significance:
Serve as guiding principles for ethical behavior and moral conduct.
Assist in conflict resolution by providing a framework for decision-making.
Contribute to social cohesion when shared within a community.
Facilitate personal development and self-improvement.
Influence leadership styles and organizational culture.
Examples of Instrumental Values: Include honesty, respect, integrity, empathy, responsibility, cooperation, accountability, courage, adaptability, patience, communication, ambition, empowerment, tolerance, and gratitude.
Impact on Behavior:
Guides decision-making in alignment with personal beliefs and principles.
Influences conflict resolution by promoting constructive approaches.
Shapes relationships by fostering healthier and more positive connections.
Moral dilemmas without clear right or wrong choices.
Cultural differences leading to varying interpretations of values.
Conclusion: Recognizing the importance of instrumental values and striving to align actions with these values can lead to more ethical, meaningful, and fulfilling lives, contributing to a just and harmonious society.
Related Frameworks, Models, Concepts
Description
When to Apply
Instrumental Values
– Values that represent the means to achieve an end. These are characteristics and behaviors that are considered morally desirable because they help achieve a desired outcome. Common examples include honesty, ambition, and responsibility.
– Important in personal development, organizational behavior, and ethics to promote behaviors that facilitate achieving goals effectively and ethically.
Terminal Values
– Values that represent the goals to be achieved, or the end-state of existence. These are ultimate life goals or the desired states that individuals strive to achieve, such as happiness, inner harmony, and professional success.
– Utilized in setting life goals, organizational missions, and personal aspirations to guide overall direction and purpose.
Ethical Values
– Principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity. Ethical values guide actions according to what is morally good and bad. They include integrity, fairness, and respect for others.
– Applied in ethical decision-making in personal, professional, and social contexts to ensure actions are morally sound.
Core Values
– Fundamental beliefs of a person or organization. These guiding principles dictate behavior and can help people understand the difference between right and wrong, helping to determine if they are on the right path to fulfilling their goals.
– Essential in shaping corporate culture, personal identity, and organizational policies to align actions with fundamental beliefs.
Social Values
– Values that are important to society, reflecting what a community considers important in terms of morality and ethics. These include justice, freedom, and community welfare.
– Considered in policy-making, community planning, and social movements to align with the ethical and moral standards of the society.
Personal Values
– Individual beliefs that dictate how a person behaves in everyday life. Personal values are unique to each individual and dictate personal priorities, influencing how one might react in various situations.
– Influential in personal growth, career choices, and lifestyle decisions, helping individuals live consistently with their beliefs.
Moral Values
– Values that concern the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character. Examples include honesty, kindness, and loyalty.
– Integral to ethical discussions, education, and character development to foster a moral society and responsible citizenship.
Organizational Values
– The fundamental beliefs that guide a business’s actions, uniting the employees to strive towards a common goal while abiding by certain standards that maintain the organization’s integrity.
– Used in corporate governance, strategy formulation, and employee engagement to ensure coherence and unity in pursuit of business objectives.
Cultural Values
– The core principles and ideals upon which an entire community exists. This reflects the shared beliefs and norms that define and guide a community’s culture.
– Examined in cross-cultural interactions, international business, and multicultural settings to respect and integrate diverse cultural perspectives.
Professional Values
– Values that are emphasized in professional settings, guiding professional behaviors, and standards. They are often encapsulated in professional codes of ethics and may include accountability, diligence, and confidentiality.
– Applied in professional development, workplace ethics, and in regulatory frameworks to maintain standards and trust in various professions.
Convergent thinking occurs when the solution to a problem can be found by applying established rules and logical reasoning. Whereas divergent thinking is an unstructured problem-solving method where participants are encouraged to develop many innovative ideas or solutions to a given problem. Where convergent thinking might work for larger, mature organizations where divergent thinking is more suited for startups and innovative companies.
The concept of cognitive biases was introduced and popularized by the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1972. Biases are seen as systematic errors and flaws that make humans deviate from the standards of rationality, thus making us inept at making good decisions under uncertainty.
Second-order thinking is a means of assessing the implications of our decisions by considering future consequences. Second-order thinking is a mental model that considers all future possibilities. It encourages individuals to think outside of the box so that they can prepare for every and eventuality. It also discourages the tendency for individuals to default to the most obvious choice.
Lateral thinking is a business strategy that involves approaching a problem from a different direction. The strategy attempts to remove traditionally formulaic and routine approaches to problem-solving by advocating creative thinking, therefore finding unconventional ways to solve a known problem. This sort of non-linear approach to problem-solving, can at times, create a big impact.
Bounded rationality is a concept attributed to Herbert Simon, an economist and political scientist interested in decision-making and how we make decisions in the real world. In fact, he believed that rather than optimizing (which was the mainstream view in the past decades) humans follow what he called satisficing.
The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias where people with low ability in a task overestimate their ability to perform that task well. Consumers or businesses that do not possess the requisite knowledge make bad decisions. What’s more, knowledge gaps prevent the person or business from seeing their mistakes.
Occam’s Razor states that one should not increase (beyond reason) the number of entities required to explain anything. All things being equal, the simplest solution is often the best one. The principle is attributed to 14th-century English theologian William of Ockham.
The Lindy Effect is a theory about the ageing of non-perishable things, like technology or ideas. Popularized by author Nicholas Nassim Taleb, the Lindy Effect states that non-perishable things like technology age – linearly – in reverse. Therefore, the older an idea or a technology, the same will be its life expectancy.
Antifragility was first coined as a term by author, and options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Antifragility is a characteristic of systems that thrive as a result of stressors, volatility, and randomness. Therefore, Antifragile is the opposite of fragile. Where a fragile thing breaks up to volatility; a robust thing resists volatility. An antifragile thing gets stronger from volatility (provided the level of stressors and randomness doesn’t pass a certain threshold).
Systems thinking is a holistic means of investigating the factors and interactions that could contribute to a potential outcome. It is about thinking non-linearly, and understanding the second-order consequences of actions and input into the system.
Vertical thinking, on the other hand, is a problem-solving approach that favors a selective, analytical, structured, and sequential mindset. The focus of vertical thinking is to arrive at a reasoned, defined solution.
Maslow’s Hammer, otherwise known as the law of the instrument or the Einstellung effect, is a cognitive bias causing an over-reliance on a familiar tool. This can be expressed as the tendency to overuse a known tool (perhaps a hammer) to solve issues that might require a different tool. This problem is persistent in the business world where perhaps known tools or frameworks might be used in the wrong context (like business plans used as planning tools instead of only investors’ pitches).
The Peter Principle was first described by Canadian sociologist Lawrence J. Peter in his 1969 book The Peter Principle. The Peter Principle states that people are continually promoted within an organization until they reach their level of incompetence.
The straw man fallacy describes an argument that misrepresents an opponent’s stance to make rebuttal more convenient. The straw man fallacy is a type of informal logical fallacy, defined as a flaw in the structure of an argument that renders it invalid.
The Streisand Effect is a paradoxical phenomenon where the act of suppressing information to reduce visibility causes it to become more visible. In 2003, Streisand attempted to suppress aerial photographs of her Californian home by suing photographer Kenneth Adelman for an invasion of privacy. Adelman, who Streisand assumed was paparazzi, was instead taking photographs to document and study coastal erosion. In her quest for more privacy, Streisand’s efforts had the opposite effect.
As highlighted by German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer in the paper “Heuristic Decision Making,” the term heuristic is of Greek origin, meaning “serving to find out or discover.” More precisely, a heuristic is a fast and accurate way to make decisions in the real world, which is driven by uncertainty.
The recognition heuristic is a psychological model of judgment and decision making. It is part of a suite of simple and economical heuristics proposed by psychologists Daniel Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer. The recognition heuristic argues that inferences are made about an object based on whether it is recognized or not.
The representativeness heuristic was first described by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The representativeness heuristic judges the probability of an event according to the degree to which that event resembles a broader class. When queried, most will choose the first option because the description of John matches the stereotype we may hold for an archaeologist.
The take-the-best heuristic is a decision-making shortcut that helps an individual choose between several alternatives. The take-the-best (TTB) heuristic decides between two or more alternatives based on a single good attribute, otherwise known as a cue. In the process, less desirable attributes are ignored.
The bundling bias is a cognitive bias in e-commerce where a consumer tends not to use all of the products bought as a group, or bundle. Bundling occurs when individual products or services are sold together as a bundle. Common examples are tickets and experiences. The bundling bias dictates that consumers are less likely to use each item in the bundle. This means that the value of the bundle and indeed the value of each item in the bundle is decreased.
The Barnum Effect is a cognitive bias where individuals believe that generic information – which applies to most people – is specifically tailored for themselves.
First-principles thinking – sometimes called reasoning from first principles – is used to reverse-engineer complex problems and encourage creativity. It involves breaking down problems into basic elements and reassembling them from the ground up. Elon Musk is among the strongest proponents of this way of thinking.
The ladder of inference is a conscious or subconscious thinking process where an individual moves from a fact to a decision or action. The ladder of inference was created by academic Chris Argyris to illustrate how people form and then use mental models to make decisions.
Goodhart’s Law is named after British monetary policy theorist and economist Charles Goodhart. Speaking at a conference in Sydney in 1975, Goodhart said that “any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
The Six Thinking Hats model was created by psychologist Edward de Bono in 1986, who noted that personality type was a key driver of how people approached problem-solving. For example, optimists view situations differently from pessimists. Analytical individuals may generate ideas that a more emotional person would not, and vice versa.
The Mandela effect is a phenomenon where a large group of people remembers an event differently from how it occurred. The Mandela effect was first described in relation to Fiona Broome, who believed that former South African President Nelson Mandela died in prison during the 1980s. While Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and died 23 years later, Broome remembered news coverage of his death in prison and even a speech from his widow. Of course, neither event occurred in reality. But Broome was later to discover that she was not the only one with the same recollection of events.
The bandwagon effect tells us that the more a belief or idea has been adopted by more people within a group, the more the individual adoption of that idea might increase within the same group. This is the psychological effect that leads to herd mentality. What in marketing can be associated with social proof.
Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles approximately every two years. This observation was made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 and it become a guiding principle for the semiconductor industry and has had far-reaching implications for technology as a whole.
Disruptive innovation as a term was first described by Clayton M. Christensen, an American academic and business consultant whom The Economist called “the most influential management thinker of his time.” Disruptive innovation describes the process by which a product or service takes hold at the bottom of a market and eventually displaces established competitors, products, firms, or alliances.
Value migration was first described by author Adrian Slywotzky in his 1996 book Value Migration – How to Think Several Moves Ahead of the Competition. Value migration is the transferal of value-creating forces from outdated business models to something better able to satisfy consumer demands.
The bye-now effect describes the tendency for consumers to think of the word “buy” when they read the word “bye”. In a study that tracked diners at a name-your-own-price restaurant, each diner was asked to read one of two phrases before ordering their meal. The first phrase, “so long”, resulted in diners paying an average of $32 per meal. But when diners recited the phrase “bye bye” before ordering, the average price per meal rose to $45.
Groupthink occurs when well-intentioned individuals make non-optimal or irrational decisions based on a belief that dissent is impossible or on a motivation to conform. Groupthink occurs when members of a group reach a consensus without critical reasoning or evaluation of the alternatives and their consequences.
A stereotype is a fixed and over-generalized belief about a particular group or class of people. These beliefs are based on the false assumption that certain characteristics are common to every individual residing in that group. Many stereotypes have a long and sometimes controversial history and are a direct consequence of various political, social, or economic events. Stereotyping is the process of making assumptions about a person or group of people based on various attributes, including gender, race, religion, or physical traits.
Murphy’s Law states that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. Murphy’s Law was named after aerospace engineer Edward A. Murphy. During his time working at Edwards Air Force Base in 1949, Murphy cursed a technician who had improperly wired an electrical component and said, “If there is any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it.”
The law of unintended consequences was first mentioned by British philosopher John Locke when writing to parliament about the unintended effects of interest rate rises. However, it was popularized in 1936 by American sociologist Robert K. Merton who looked at unexpected, unanticipated, and unintended consequences and their impact on society.
Fundamental attribution error is a bias people display when judging the behavior of others. The tendency is to over-emphasize personal characteristics and under-emphasize environmental and situational factors.
Outcome bias describes a tendency to evaluate a decision based on its outcome and not on the process by which the decision was reached. In other words, the quality of a decision is only determined once the outcome is known. Outcome bias occurs when a decision is based on the outcome of previous events without regard for how those events developed.
Hindsight bias is the tendency for people to perceive past events as more predictable than they actually were. The result of a presidential election, for example, seems more obvious when the winner is announced. The same can also be said for the avid sports fan who predicted the correct outcome of a match regardless of whether their team won or lost. Hindsight bias, therefore, is the tendency for an individual to convince themselves that they accurately predicted an event before it happened.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
