Abstract:

Organizational values are the integral part of corporate culture. The purpose of this paper is to examine the espoused values of largest companies in Croatia in order to determine to what extent companies espouse their values and what are the most common espoused values. Schwartz value model was used in order to classify values. Content analysis of all 182 Croatian companies with more than 500 employees has revealed that in most cases espoused values were not clearly articulated and easily available. Although value statements varied greatly among the researched companies, it was shown that most often espoused values were related to Schwartz’s self-transcendence values, followed by conservation-related values. The average number of espoused for large Croatian companies equals to 5.5. Large companies in Croatia could improve their value communication by communicating their values in a clearer way through value statements.