Leading Research Areas of Personal, Organizational Values and Their Congruence: A Bibliometric Analysis

In recent decades, with the growing interest of researchers in personal and organizational values and their congruence, the number of areas of interest to researchers in this field of research is also increasing. However, due to the huge amount of data and the different methods applied, it becomes complicated to identify themes important for management science and predict promising directions for further research. Therefore, this study aims to reveal the most important thematic areas related to the field of research on personal and organisational values congruence.

The research sample consisted of 33626 articles, of which 6527 articles corresponded to the field of personal values research; 27011, to the field of organizational values research; and 98, to the field of research on personal and organizational values congruence. The articles in the field of management science were searched for in The Web of Science Core Collection database, covering the period from 1995 to 2023. A qualitative research method was employed, performing a keyword co-occurrence analysis and drawing up maps of co-occurrence network of keywords.

In the field of personal values, 7 themes were identified, among which the focus on leadership, competition, organizational value, and cultural context was most evident. The field of organizational values research consisted of 5 themes, where the researchers paid most attention to the areas related to organizational value, organizational culture and management. In the field of research on personal and organizational values congruence, 7 other themes were found with a predominant focus on originality value and work engagement.

This study contributes to a greater understanding of the trends of research on personal and organizational values and their congruence in the field of management science and shows possible directions for further research.