Page 31 - Wells Fargo Bank (C) Teaching Note

their statements on mission and values? The answer lies
in the fact that employees take their cultural cues not

from what management says but from what it signals.

Those signals were embedded throughout the workplace.

They appeared in overt ways, such as how compensation

and recognition were done. They also emerged in subtler

ways, such as in the metrics managers obsess over, and

how they reacted to dissenting opinions. Moreover, they

simply inform employees’ views about what types of

people and behaviour a company truly values.

Mission statements and values were thus subsumed by

the focus and shaping of employees’ perceptions by a

management that would not or could not recognise what

constituted good rather than bad behaviour.