Understanding Responsibility: The Influence of Core Values on Personal Attributes and Behaviors
- Greg Mullen
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Responsibility as a Core Value is more than checking off tasks. It is the place where accountability (answering for outcomes) intersects with priorities (deciding what matters most). These two complementary dimensions are meant to help us reflect on our individual and collective understanding of Responsibility a Core Value where "Values" are behavioral ideals we pursue rather than specific behaviors we apply to all contexts and situations.
The two perpendicular dimensions that effectively map this intersection:
(A) Locus of Control – Who dictates the action?
External control: rules, bosses, legal codes
Internal control: personal values, moral reasoning, self-discipline
(B) Focus of Oversight – Whose welfare tops the agenda?
Community-focused: the collective’s safety, cohesion, or mission
Individual-focused: one’s own growth, goals, or security
The grid formed by these axes yields four distinct mind-sets, each shaping how people approach duty, risk, and reward.
The Four Responsibility Mindsets
The following four mindsets are explored with a Core Belief, two Illustrative examples, and a takeaway.
Collective Conformity (External Control ✕ Community Focus)
Core belief: “I follow the rules to keep the group safe.”
Illustrations
Public Safety: A city lifeguard keeps a whistle at the ready and enforces no-running signs. Her manual is explicit: prevention trumps persuasion. She may never meet the children she protects, yet her actions stem from codified duty to the entire pool community.
Manufacturing Floor: An assembly-line technician halts production the moment a machine guard is missing. The safety rulebook leaves no wiggle room; his shutdown costs the company minutes but averts possible group injury and OSHA fines.
Take-away: Responsibility here is procedural—strong, predictable, and universally applied, but it relies on the presence of external authority to remain active.
Compliant Individualism (External Control ✕ Individual Focus)
Core belief: “I meet formal requirements so I remain blameless.”
Illustrations
Tax Season: A freelancer hires an accountant to comb every receipt. She is less interested in civic contribution than in avoiding an audit that could upend her finances.
Corporate Ladder: A junior analyst checks every presentation slide three times—not to elevate the team’s insight, but because a single typo might tank her performance review.
Take-away: Rule adherence is high, but motives are self-protective. Innovation or communal risk-taking rarely flourish in this quadrant.
Steward Leadership (Internal Control ✕ Community Focus)
Core belief: “I own the mission because this community matters to me.”
Illustrations
Neighborhood Advocacy: Noticing that garbage trucks skip elderly residents’ alleyways, a neighbor organizes volunteers and petitions city council—no ordinance compelled her, but communal dignity did.
School Improvement: A veteran teacher tracks reading slumps after a curriculum overhaul. Instead of blaming district mandates, he crafts supplemental workshops and mentors peers, driven by an inner conviction that all students deserve fluent literacy.
Take-away: When personal principles align with collective welfare, responsibility turns agile and proactive—rules become the floor, not the ceiling.
Self-Directed Mastery (Internal Control ✕ Individual Focus)
Core belief: “I hold myself to high standards for my own growth.”
Illustrations
Craft and Skill: An amateur pianist rises at dawn to refine arpeggios no adjudicator will hear; the reward is the pursuit itself.
Tech Excellence: After a successful product launch, a software engineer re-reads error logs solely to sharpen her craft, long after leadership calls the sprint “done.”
Take-away: Responsibility becomes intrinsic and future-oriented, often producing expertise that later benefits others—yet outside affirmation is optional.
How the Six Core Attributes Shift Across Quadrants
The tables that follow walk each of the six Virtues through all four quadrants of Fairness as a Core Value, pairing each Virtue-specific quadrant with a concrete, everyday vignette. Virtues are ranges of behaviors that we continually seek to balance between extreme vices, e.g. Courage is the balance between rashness and cowardice; Pride is the balance between vanity and diffidence.
It's important to note that the goal here is not to pronounce one quadrant as the only ideal to be pursued or that a behavior reflecting a particular quadrant as an ideal behavior to adapt across all contexts and situations. Rather, the goal is to show how Virtues can be expressed in alignment with different understandings of Fairness as a Core Value depending on the balance of control (external vs. internal) and focus (community vs. individual) at play. The more we understand our behaviors and how they may be influencing (and influenced by) how we understand Core Values such as Responsibility can help us reflect and grow from not only our own responses to situations but also strengthen our empathy, compassion, and patience toward others.
Keep this frame in mind as you read through each table. Each example of everyday expression is a directional marker on the larger map of Responsibility as a Core Value that reveals how subtle shifts in who sets the rules or whose needs we prioritize can influence our behavior (and the culture around us) in potentially predictable, actionable ways.
1. Courage
The steady nerve that steers between timid silence and reckless aggression, confronting unfairness without becoming its mirror.
Quadrant | Everyday Expression |
Collective Conformity (External + Community) | A flight attendant firmly but calmly removes an unruly passenger because aviation policy says a single disturbance endangers everyone on board. |
Compliant Individualism (External + Individual) | A warehouse shift-lead files an accident report mainly to shield herself from disciplinary action, not to spark broader safety reform. |
Steward Leadership (Internal + Community) | A city engineer testifies at a public hearing that a popular development plan will flood low-income neighborhoods—risking career backlash to protect residents. |
Self-Directed Mastery (Internal + Individual) | A novice triathlete blogs candidly about a race failure, dissecting every misstep so she—and any reader—can train smarter next season. |
2. Wit
The agile humor that threads the line between dull literalism and cutting mockery, illuminating inequity without belittling people.
Quadrant | Everyday Expression |
Collective Conformity | A police sergeant opens roll-call with a light joke that reinforces an official traffic-stop script, easing officers into the day while underscoring protocol. |
Compliant Individualism | A mid-level accountant uses self-deprecating humor to dodge blame for a late report—“Hey, at least the IRS deadline is firm!”—defusing tension without fixing root issues. |
Steward Leadership | A hospital charge nurse pens a playful memo that lampoons outdated paperwork, inviting staff to brainstorm modern, patient-centered alternatives. |
Self-Directed Mastery | A stand-up comic tests risky material in open mics, using audience laughs (or silence) as data to refine her craft—humor as a personal laboratory. |
3. Pride
The grounded self-respect poised midway between self-negating meekness and boastful superiority, upholding fairness without vanity.
Quadrant | Everyday Expression |
Collective Conformity | A cadet feels pride when every inspection pin is aligned to regulation; missing one button tarnishes her sense of worth. |
Compliant Individualism | A salesperson frames her pride around quarterly numbers—hitting target equals self-esteem; falling short erodes it. |
Steward Leadership | A community organizer feels proud when a neighborhood garden thrives—even if funders never credit her—because it feeds local families. |
Self-Directed Mastery | A hobbyist woodworker beams over a flawless dovetail joint nobody else will notice; the benchmark is his inner standard, not applause. |
4. Magnanimity
The open hand that balances stingy self-protection with showy largesse, giving enough to level the field without creating dependence.
Quadrant | Everyday Expression |
Collective Conformity | Corporate staff fulfill a company-mandated “volunteer day,” logging hours at a food bank because HR tracks participation. |
Compliant Individualism | A college senior donates blood during a campus drive mainly to earn the service chord that boosts her résumé. |
Steward Leadership | A restaurant owner launches a weekly pay-what-you-can night, absorbing costs so that food-insecure neighbors dine with dignity. |
Self-Directed Mastery | A freelance designer quietly funds micro-loans for other creatives, viewing each loan as an investment in the wider craft—and in her own legacy of excellence. |
5. Friendliness
The warm rapport that avoids both guarded hostility and ingratiating flattery, fostering trust that makes fair exchange possible.
Quadrant | Everyday Expression |
Collective Conformity | Retail employees greet every shopper with a scripted smile to maintain brand harmony. |
Compliant Individualism | A consultant networks at conferences, exchanging cards with whoever might advance her next contract. |
Steward Leadership | A team lead schedules “coffee chats” across departments purely to weave stronger cross-functional relationships that benefit the organization. |
Self-Directed Mastery | A remote developer builds a small circle of peers for deep code reviews, valuing honest critique over social polish to sharpen her own skills. |
6. Temperance
The measured appetite that resists both indulgent excess and joyless denial, apportioning resources so everyone’s needs are met.
Quadrant | Everyday Expression |
Collective Conformity | An employee exits the office the moment policy allows, and refrains from overtime snacks because the handbook bans food at desks. |
Compliant Individualism | A student crams all night before finals, then binge-streams shows afterward—regulating effort only when grades depend on it. |
Steward Leadership | A nonprofit director paces her workload to avoid burnout, modeling balanced living so staff feel permission to do the same. |
Self-Directed Mastery | A marathoner declines a second dessert wine at dinner, guided by her own training log rather than any external diet rule. |
Key Take-Away
Setting the same virtue in four different quadrants reveals how contextual responsibility as a Core Value can shape our behavior. Whether we enforce rules, protect ourselves, uplift communities, or chase personal excellence, the interplay of control and focus as defining dimensions of Responsibility as a Core Value colors our Courage, Wit, Pride, Magnanimity, Friendliness, and Temperance in distinct (and perhaps even predictable) ways.
What may be most important about this connection of Virtues and Values is their potential for helping us as individuals to reflect on behaviors as they relate to not only our specific ratio of personality traits but also how we have (or may not have) developed socioemotional competencies as they relate to how we perceive ourselves and the world around us.
Community vs. Individual Lens: Collaborative vs. Personal Responsibility
A Community-Focused mindset will instinctively ask, “How will this help or harm us?” Their courage, wit, and generosity lean collaborative—rallying volunteers, diffusing team friction, sharing credit.
An Individual-Focused mindset will ask, “How does this strengthen my journey?” Their attributes manifest in self-initiative—up-skilling alone, negotiating personal risk, setting private standards that may later raise the collective bar.
Neither lens is inherently superior; friction emerges only when external control stifles moral agency or when individual pursuit forgets shared stakes.
Practical Implications: Moving Across the Grid
A single pivot can recast familiar tasks.
External → Internal Control: A project manager stops updating spreadsheets just for compliance and begins removing resource bottlenecks because she values craftsmanship—team morale soars.
Individual → Community Focus: An elite athlete starts mentoring rookies, converting private discipline into collective uplift; the locker room culture transforms.
Mapping your current quadrant can clarify hidden drivers and help improve reflection for making deliberate shifts that unlock latent potential in individuals (and groups).
Final Thoughts | Navigate Coordinates
Responsibility is not a checklist—it is a design choice about who sketches the boxes and whose well-being those boxes protect. The moment you make that choice consciously, the six core virtues—courage, wit, pride, magnanimity, friendliness, and temperance—stop floating as abstract ideals and snap into focus as precise, situational tools.
Locate yourself on the grid. Pinpoint which quadrant currently shapes your decisions. Do you lean on external rules to keep the peace, pursue private goals with internal grit, or something in between?
Interrogate the fit. Ask whether those coordinates still serve your purpose, your team, and the communities you touch. If they don’t, pivot deliberately. A small nudge—shifting control from external to internal, or widening focus from self to group—can turn routine compliance into principled stewardship or solitary mastery into shared uplift.
Navigate, Don’t Drift.
Run a “Responsibility Inventory.”
This week, track one decision each day and jot down which quadrant it reflects—and why.
Consider the Value of Team or Partner Sessions.
Share your maps, surface collective patterns, and discuss whether your current mix truly advances your shared goals.
Set a 30-Day Navigation Goal.
Choose one virtue and one axis to shift (e.g., move Courage from Compliant Individualism toward Steward Leadership) and design a concrete behavior you are able and willing to practice.
Re-calibrate Regularly.
Every month, revisit the grid. Celebrate quadrant shifts that unlocked new value, and chart fresh adjustments for the next leg of the journey.
Make this more of a compass rather than a cage. When you navigate responsibility with intent, character expands, communities thrive, and the boxes you draw today become launching pads for more flexible and intentional decision-making.
Greg Mullen
June 5, 2025
