Personal Narrative: Ten Month Conflicting Values

While working for a startup, micro-sized accounting firm founded by my wife’s uncle, I found myself with the responsibility of leading the organization’s payroll service. In such a setting, this duty encompassed virtually all facets of business functions including sales, developing uniform system processes, managing information technology, nurturing client relations, and completing the payroll operations just to name a few. The company at that point grew from a single client having two employees to around 50 clients and a total of approximately 6,000 employees within a single quarter. Such growth paired with the lack of payroll-experienced employees within the organization led to a high stress environment fueled by crunched deadlines and on-the-job learning that usually led to serious error. Our team would find that in order to stay ahead of the deadlines from week to week, we would often need to work 50+ hours each week. All of these aforementioned items led to dwindling of my satisfaction on the job. However, I stayed with the company for ten more …show more content…
However, the values held by the founder conflicted with my core values. Even though I possess instrumental values such as being ambitious, logical and responsible, I pair those with terminal values such as freedom, happiness and pleasure. In other words, I enjoy working hard, however, when the work day is complete, I enjoy leaving it all behind.
A postmodern approach, according to Presentation 2, states “what works for me, works for me, and what works for you, works for you” (Kahlib Fischer, n.d). I believe that in this instance of high pressure, my boss lost sight of a covenantal approach of managing and focused on projecting his image of Type-A workaholic personality on all of us in the