When Your Job Does Not Speak Your Language

Every day, we make big and small decisions that reflect our personal values: who we vote for, what we buy and how we raise our children. But do values also play a role in our workplace performance? Does the alignment — or misalignment — of personal values with our colleagues or managers affect our productivity?

For years, researchers and business leaders have sought to understand why some organizations outperform others. Culture is often touted as a key factor, shaping how people collaborate and work toward common goals. But within organizations, performance differences can be just as stark. Two employees with the same job title, similar qualifications and equal access to resources can produce vastly different results. Why?

A common answer is that employees who align with their organization’s values perform better. But this explanation misses a crucial point: employees bring their own personal values to work, and these values do not always align with those of their peers or managers. Think about a manager who cares about hard work and obedience trying to lead a team where subordinates value creativity and self-expression. Even if subordinates are competent, this misalignment can create frictions, communication breakdowns and ultimately decrease productivity.

Studying a major global bank with over 200,000 employees, we explored how personal value differences impact workplace performance. We surveyed employees and managers about the values they believe are most important to teach children and examined how these differences relate to job performance, career progression and retention.

Employees whose values are misaligned with their managers perform worse, particularly on more objective productivity metrics. While misalignment among peers has some impact on turnover — increasing the likelihood that an employee exits — the main performance costs come from employees not seeing eye-to-eye with their managers.

Why does misalignment in personal values matter? Our study finds that communication breakdowns are a primary driver. Employees whose values are more distant from the values of their manager are less likely to discuss progress, participate in informal meetings, voice concerns or feel psychologically safe at work. Without open lines of communication, collaboration suffers and performance declines.

These findings challenge a lot of conventional wisdom about workplace diversity. While most diversity research focuses on visible factors like gender or ethnicity, this study suggests that deeper, less visible differences — such as personal values — can be just as important, if not more so, in determining workplace outcomes.

So what should organizations do? The study offers three key recommendations. First, foster psychological safety: Encouraging open communication and trust can help employees work through value differences instead of letting them fester. Second, improve team assignments: While restructuring teams to improve value alignment is an option, it comes with risks — such as employees misreporting their values or stifling creativity. Third, increase awareness: Simply helping employees better understand their colleagues’ values can improve collaboration and reduce friction. We indeed find that workers who accurately perceived their coworkers’ values are more productive.

The bottom line? Personal values matter, and they shape the way we work far more than we realize. If companies want to maximize performance, they need to stop treating employees like interchangeable parts and start paying attention to what drives them at their core. A good fit is not just about skills and experience — it is about values, too. And in a world where communication and teamwork are more critical than ever, organizations that recognize this hidden dimension of performance will have a serious competitive edge.