Value and moral divergences between management researchers and managers: Evidence and a future research agenda

Abstract We know little about the values and morals that management researchers hold and whether they align with a key set of stakeholders they intend to inform—managers in industry. This alignment matters because values and morals serve as guiding principles and are important drivers of attitudes and behavior, and differences in values and morals can cause conflicts, misunderstandings, and a lack of trust. In this empirical study, we take stock of the values and morals of US‐based management researchers and compare them with a sample of US‐based practicing managers and establish the phenomenon of value divergences. We found differences on 12 of the 19 values, with managers placing more emphasis on the five values of power–dominance, security–societal, tradition, hedonism, and humility and researchers placing more emphasis on the seven values of achievement, self‐direction–thought, self‐direction–action, benevolence–dependability, benevolence–caring, universalism–concern, and universalism–tolerance. In addition, managers placed greater weight on four of the six moral foundations: equality, loyalty, authority, and purity. We found that managers were slightly less liberal on average than the management researchers but only for social issues and not economic issues. We discuss several theoretical and practical implications of these findings and offer a future research agenda for how future work can address scholarly value “blind spots” through better understanding researcher and manager similarities and differences.