The Personal Values of Australian Managers

Abstract

A significant part of management literature deals with the personal characteristics of managers, attempting to define what is required of a good manager. Further to this work, there has been some investigation of the extent to which differences in managerial functioning might be due to differences between the managers themselves rather than the nature of their jobs or the type of organization in which they work. As part of a larger study results were obtained for samples of public service and private enterprise managers on the Gordon Survey of Personal Values. While personal factors such as age, area of work or educational background did not correspond with differences in personal values, the public sector/private sector variable was related to a difference in values, on one of the six scales in particular.

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