Work Values in Different Cultural Contexts: Meaning and Measurement

Despite the strong emphasis on work values in the explanation of job satisfaction and commitment to work, little attention has been paid to the actual concept of work values. The bulk of research agrees that work values are a multidimensional construct, ranging from rewards seeking to questions of work-life balance. Yet only a handful of studies have tried to disentangle this dimensionality, whereby they mainly relied on comparisons between generations and largely neglected cultural differences in the understanding of work values. With respect to this, the aim of this paper is to, first, disentangle the conceptual diffusion between work values, work ethic, and work attitudes and, second, to empirically test the potential dimensions underlying the concept(s). In detail, we want to answer the question of whether work values construct a multidimensional concept and if so, to what extent are these dimensions found in different cultural contexts? The large number of work values measures in both large-scale cross-national surveys and small country-sample surveys make it difficult to determine the key dimensions that constitute the construct of work values. We tackle this issue by relying on various data sources, in particular, the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) and the European Values Study (EVS), which have extensive measures of work values, as well as the CUPESSE data from 2016. Preliminary results reveal that work values hold both extrinsic and intrinsic dimensions, but these dimensions differ between countries, data sets, and generations. Thus, work values have different meanings across countries and generations