Hester van Herk

Organizational values shape workplace practices, employee experiences, and HR outcomes such as recruitment, retention, and employer branding. Yet measuring these intangible constructs remains challenging. This study applies natural language processing to analyze employee-reported organizational values from 880 German companies (2012–2019), examining how Schwartz’s basic human values manifest in workplace contexts and relate to workplace satisfaction. Using a German adaptation of the Personal Values Dictionary, we analyzed open-ended text responses from more than 500,000 employees describing their employers’ values. We examined three questions: (1) the structure of values at the organizational level, (2) variance in values within and between industries, and (3) associations between organizational values and workplace satisfaction. Results show that universalism, achievement, and benevolence are the most frequently referenced values in organizations. Multidimensional scaling reveals that the organizational value structure partially differs from Schwartz’s individual-level theory, reflecting distinct organizational goals. Industry type explains only 6.6% of the variance in value expression, suggesting considerable organizational leeway in shaping culture beyond institutional constraints. Organizational values show strong correlations with workplace satisfaction: self-transcendence values, particularly benevolence ( r = 0.39), correlate positively, while self-enhancement values, especially power ( r = –0.63), correlate negatively. These patterns align with predictions from self-determination theory regarding need-supportive versus need-frustrating work environments. The study demonstrates the utility of text-based measurement for capturing organizational values and their relationship with employee outcomes. By extending Schwartz’s value theory from the individual to the organizational level through employee-generated text, findings reveal systematic deviations in how values structure and function in organizational contexts. For HR practice, results underscore that values emphasizing care, fairness, and ethical treatment are central to workplace satisfaction, a key driver of retention and performance.

Values are important building blocks of ideologies and regularly referenced in political debates all over the world. They are also abstract, requiring some process of translation to connect them with behaviours or preferences over policies. However, it is still unclear how this translation takes form or how it differs across contexts, like different countries and cultures. With this paper, we introduce a large-scale and high-quality dataset of news and political manifestos in multiple languages, that was annotated and curated by values scholars according to the Schwartz (1992), Schwartz et al. (2012) theory of human values. Moreover, each expression of values annotated in the texts included a second layer of identification expressing the degree of fulfilment of the value in the text, specifically whether the value was (partially) attained or (partially) constrained. The final dataset comprises 2,648 annotated texts in nine languages, totalling 74,231 sentences. The dataset can be used to investigate the expression of values in the news articles and political manifestos that were annotated and as training materials for the development of automated values detection methods, using natural language processing algorithms.

This paper assesses and validates indexes of human values as conceptualized in the Schwartz framework using the Rokeach Value Survey in the publicly available LISS panel data (www.lisspanel.nl), thereby opening an avenue for researchers to relate values to a wide range of attitudes, traits, and behaviors with the most widely used and tested values theory. We start with a theoretical screening of the value items, after which we use multi-dimensional scaling to assess the item’s correlation structure. We developed reliable and valid indexes for 8 of the 10 Schwartz values, of which universalism, achievement, benevolence, and conformity contain 3 or more items, and self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, and security contain 1 or 2 items. We assess the RVS-based indexes by comparing them with other Schwartz indexes in the World Value Survey and the European Social Survey data. Using regressions, all 8 values also show the expected relationships with demographics, political orientation, and personality traits. By tailoring the RVS to align with the Schwartz value structure, researchers can use a well-established framework for assessing human values longitudinally and cross-sectionally, enabling better comparisons and insights across studies and time periods.

In cross-cultural psychology there is a strong tradition of psychometric analysis of bias and invariance (equivalence) after collection of data in distinct populations with identical instruments developed in one population. This implies a focus on measurement outcomes and an operationalist orientation to science. Here we explore how a focus on joint development and content validity of instruments combined with relaxation of the demand of item identity can provide an additional perspective. Three points are addressed:(1) Any comparison between participants from two, or more, populations presumes a common quality (property, attribute) and requires a common measurement scale, a “standard of comparison”.(2) Stevens (1946) four levels of measurement are distinguished for a standard of comparison; this level (nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio) determines to which kinds of psychometric comparisons data are open.(3) A standard of comparison can be based on an existing instrument that is transferred from one population to some other population, with or without modification. It can also be a newly developed instrument that may be based, but (we argue) need not be based, on a set of stimuli or items that is identical across populations.Three considerations are mentioned: (i) representation of all participating populations at all stages of instrument development, (ii) emphasis on content validity, and (iii) various tools such as item banks and item parameters from IRT models that can help to derive a comparison standard from only partly overlapping item sets.

Differences between nations are a main topic of interest in business studies. Country-level variables such as GDP per capita, legislation, type of government and culture are used in studies to explain differences and similarities between countries. These variables are mostly related to the economic situation of countries and their inhabitants. There is a relationship between wealth and form of government (democracies are more affluent), and between wealth and culture dimensions (individualistic countries are more affluent). Despite this link between culture and wealth, the level of affluence (measured in GDP per capita) is not always considered in studies in which culture is included. The question is whether this is justified. At a more specific level, more affluent countries have a better retail infrastructure to provide goods and services and consumers also have, on average, greater purchasing power to buy goods and services.Our results of analyses of consumer purchases across 22 product groups in over 50 countries per cultural values framework, covering a period of 30 years (1990-2019) can be summarized in three points. (i) Culture dimensions (Individualism-collectivism by Hofstede, Embeddedness – Autonomy by Schwartz and both dimensions identified by Inglehart) are strong correlates of consumer expenditure. (ii) These dimensions explain only a very limited proportion of additional variance (in the order of .00 - .01) after national differences in GDP per capita have been accounted for. (iii) A statistically significant proportion of variance in Share of Wallet for a few product categories is explained by cultural dimensions, but effect sizes are small. Economic and cultural sources of variance are confounded, but the findings suggest that only a very limited proportion of variance can be ascribed uniquely to national differences in culture dimensions.

This paper proposes a method to measure basic human values using the Rokeach Value Survey (RVS, Rokeach, 1973) within the Longitudinal Internet Studies for Social Sciences (LISS; Scherpenzeel & Das, 2010). The LISS, running for over 12 years in the Netherlands, serves as a valuable source of data to study the development of values across the lifespan. We identify and assign RVS items to Schwartz (1992) value types based on theoretical overlap, and conduct a weak confirmatory multidimensional scaling analysis to assess the coverage of values. The selected items are then used to compute value scales, which are compared to an established value scale (Portrait Values Questionnaire) using rankings and Procrustes analysis. Lastly, the predictive validity of the value measurements is assessed through linear regression, comparing standardized regression coefficients of socio-demographic factors on each value type. By adapting the Rokeach Value Survey to align with the Schwartz (1992) value structure, researchers can establish a consistent framework for assessing human values longitudinally, enabling better comparisons and insights across different studies and time periods.