Abstract

This paper employs data from a sample of the CEOs and top managers of seventy-nine U.S. companies and non-profit organizations to test hypotheses concerning the effects of the salience of organizational values on the accuracy of top managers’ perceptions of their CEOs’ values and their propensities to project their own values onto their CEOs. Results provide evidence that the salience of organizational values is positively related to both accuracy in subordinates’ perceptions of their superiors’ values and projection of the subordinates’ values onto their superiors. This initially counterintuitive result is explained with reference to contemporary views of projection as a heuristic rather than as a non-normative bias that results in the cognitive distortion of reality.