LEADERSHIP CHARACTERISTICS OF ... - Drake University

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activists and union members. Interviews with CEOs might further clarify
their perception of the importance of wisdom within their value set.
Clearly, the instrumental values of honesty, responsibility,
capability, and courage emerged as consistent values of importance to
Iowa hospital CEOs. While the findings suggest that these top four values
are consistent with other executives' values, we don't know if there are
stronger differentiating factors, such as lowans, healthcarelhospitals, or
CEOs.
Hospital CEOs ranked the instrumental values of politeness,
obedience and cleanliness as least important of the 18 values. Findings
do not indicate to what extent lowans, healthcare practitioners, or other
CEOs rank these three values. It should be noted that differences in
values interpretation might be based on underlying meanings of the words
and phrases in the RVS and could account for the variability in rankings
(Rokeach, 1973).
Hospital CEOs' top five values, in both terminal and instrumental
realms, consistently aligned (60%-80%) with those of executives, union
members, and activists. Because of the similarities among the values
within these classes, it is not known whether these are universal personal
values, values deemed most important to a culture, or some other
phenomenon related to determining personal values.