| Summary: | Social and business culture are integrated constructs that determine how organisations function as a subsystem of the larger society in which it provides outputs or services (Katz & Kahn, 1978). In South Africa most organisations, including Mining organisations, are still conceptualised and structured in a Western/Eurocentric mould (Van der Wal & Ramotsehoa, 2001). The culture of organisations is dominated by these values (Du Plessis, 2012) and the fact that the largest proportion of the population/workforce is neither European nor American, but African, is largely ignored (Xiaoxing et al., 2008). In practice many employees cannot relate to these values and little congruence exists between organisational values and goals, and those of the general workforce (Du Plessis, 2012).
Values are at the heart of culture and influence most, if not all motivated behaviour (Schwartz, 2006). Individuals function across multiple domains and over time to construct life stories that both shape and reflect the social structures of which they are part or have been part of during their life course (Kohn, 1989). The context of an individualâs life course facilitates values acquisition, which enables individuals to function in organisations where work occurs in lower or higher degrees of complexity, people communicate, and have access to each other, informed by the business/functional objectives of the organisation to perform a pattern of activities at incoherent levels of complexity, separated into a serious of steps or levels of work called organisational hierarchy.
Using a non-experimental design and a convenience sampling approach to collect data, the data was analysed employing a broad scope of descriptive and inferential statistics, including Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Multi-dimensional Scaling. The existing theory on values as formulated by Schwartz was utilised to study value priorities at the various levels of work in the South African Mining Industry. The non-parametric analyses provided clear indication that significant differences in value priorities do exist between the various levels of work. Multiple independent variables, levels of work, required an extension of the non-parametric analyses to investigate the movement in the values priorities of the levels of work. These analyses assisted to confirm the hypotheses, but also provided an understanding of why the value priorities changed for the various levels of work.
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