The Bureaucrat, the Businessperson, and Their Perceptions of Each Other's Value Orientation: Empirical Notions on the Other Sector's Most Important Organizational Values

How do business and government managers perceive each other's value orientations? The debate on ethics in the public and private sectors has largely neglected this question. A survey of 231 top-level government officials and 151 business executives in the Netherlands found remarkable differences between the moral self-images of public and private sector managers and their perceptions of each other. An important practical implication is that managers in each sector should be aware of the ways their ethical self-images differ from those of their counterparts in the other arena.