# Work Values Examples: What to Look For and How to Choose Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/work-values-examples/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/work-values-examples.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving setting goals at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Work values examples sorted into five types - intrinsic, extrinsic, social, prestige, lifestyle - plus how to turn a long list into a decision you can act on. ## Key facts - Title: Work Values Examples: What to Look For and How to Choose - Category: Setting Goals - Primary skill: Setting Goals - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Working with Your Manager - Primary keyword: work values examples - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/work-values-examples/ ## What this page covers - Work values examples sorted into five types - intrinsic, extrinsic, social, prestige, lifestyle - plus how to turn a long list into a decision you can act on. - Practical guidance for work values examples - How this topic connects to Setting Goals ## Detailed explanation Most searches for work values examples end at a list, and the list is the easy part. Work values are what you need a job to give you before it feels worth doing — autonomy, security, learning, recognition, fair pay, good colleagues, flexibility, influence, work that matters to someone. The useful move is not collecting more of these words. It is knowing which type each one belongs to, because that is what tells you which ones will collide in a real job. That distinction is where most values exercises quietly stop working. Here is what sits underneath the list. ## What "work values" actually means — and what it doesn't A work value is a requirement, not a preference. It is the thing whose absence makes an otherwise good job feel wrong, and it tends to be stubborn: you can talk yourself out of a preference, but not out of a value. Two things it isn't. It isn't a strength — you can be excellent at work you find hollow. And it isn't a [company's published core values](/knowledge/setting-goals/company-culture/). A large share of what comes back for this term is written for HR readers: pages from Achievers, AIHR and status.net offering integrity, innovation and accountability as things an organization should print on a wall. Useful for drafting a values statement; useless for deciding whether to take the offer in your inbox. No definitive list exists, either. The individual-facing sources run from twenty items on Career.io to eighty on Indeed, one hundred and eight on Simplicable and more than a hundred and fifty on status.net — and the longer versions mostly add synonyms rather than new ideas. The research doesn't agree with itself: an older instrument from Wollack and colleagues, cited in a review of work-values research, cuts the same territory into six subscales entirely — status, activity, striving, earnings, pride and involvement. So the pressure to find the *right* words is misplaced. Any reasonable list will do. What matters is the sorting. ## The five types of work values Ros, Schwartz and Surkiss, in their 1999 work on basic values and the meaning of work, sorted work values into four types — intrinsic, extrinsic, social and prestige. Career-guidance practice has since added a fifth, lifestyle, which most individual-facing sources now treat as co-equal despite its sitting outside the original taxonomy. Why this matters more than the list: within a category, values rarely fight each other. Across categories, they do it constantly. A job that gives you more of one type is usually taking something from another, and that is the trade you are being asked to make. ### Intrinsic values — what the work itself gives you These attach to the process and content of the work rather than anything it produces afterward: interest in the subject, learning and mastery, autonomy over how you do the job, variety, creativity, the chance to use what you are good at. The test is simple. If the work were unpaid and no one knew you had done it, would any of it still be worth something to you? Whatever survives is intrinsic. This category is easy to under-notice early on, because a first job is absorbing regardless of content — everything is new, so everything feels interesting. Intrinsic values usually announce themselves in year two or three, once the novelty has gone. ### Extrinsic values — what the work pays out Salary and benefits, job security, predictable hours, physical conditions, a visible path to the next level. These are the outcomes of work rather than the work. Extrinsic values have one structural advantage that quietly distorts decisions: they are written down. A salary figure, a holiday allowance and a job title can be compared across two offers in about a minute, while nothing in the other four categories can be compared at all before you start. So they carry more weight in the decision than they end up carrying in the experience. If your shortlist leans this way, name it without embarrassment. Research on generational cohorts by Twenge and colleagues reports leisure and extrinsic values rising across successive groups entering the workforce, while social and intrinsic values decline. That is close to the modal profile, not a deviation from it. ### Social values — who you work with, and who it serves Two things sit here, worth separating. One is the immediate human environment: colleagues you like, real collaboration rather than parallel solo work, someone willing to teach you. The other is contribution — work that visibly benefits a customer or a community. Social values are the hardest of the five to assess before you accept a job and among the most common [reasons people leave](/knowledge/setting-goals/should-i-quit-my-job/) one. They appear nowhere in a job description and everywhere in a Tuesday afternoon. If this ranks high for you, meeting the team you would actually sit with matters more than another look at the package. ### Prestige values — standing and influence Authority over decisions, [influence on direction](/knowledge/influence/influence-without-authority/), recognition, title, the external standing of the employer or profession. This is the category people most often leave off, because naming it feels immodest. The omission has a cost: an unnamed value still operates, just without your knowledge — which is how someone ends up two years into a role that satisfies everything they wrote down and still feels diminishing. A better test than asking yourself directly is envy. Whose situation is faintly uncomfortable to hear about? That discomfort usually points here. ### Lifestyle values — how work fits around everything else Flexibility, remote or hybrid arrangements, commute, leave, and where the boundary between work hours and the rest of your life falls. Work-life balance appears on essentially every list in this space, which is why practice added a category the original taxonomy has no room for. This is the only category whose satisfaction depends on things happening outside work, which makes it the one most likely to shift under you. A value that was inert at twenty-two can become non-negotiable at thirty with no change in the person — only in the surrounding life. Weight it for where you expect to be, not only where you are. ## What work values examples can't tell you Nearly every guide here recommends the same method: read the list, rate each item, narrow to six or ten. That is a fine first hour, and where almost all advice stops. But a shortlist of ten values is not a decision aid. Everything on it sounds good — that is why it is on there. Only a minority of sources — the University of Pennsylvania's career services team and the Values Institute among them — name the step that does the work: force the trade-offs. Take two values you rated equally highly and put them in direct opposition, in a concrete case. Would you take twenty percent less to work on something genuinely interesting? Would you give up a short commute for a team you learn from? You will not enjoy answering, and that is the point — a value becomes usable only when it costs you something. The second thing a list cannot do is tell you whether a value is yours or borrowed. Rating items in the abstract measures what sounds appealing, which is shaped by what your family valued, what your degree assumed, and what your friends are chasing. Work from evidence instead: think of two or three stretches at work, study or a side project when you were genuinely absorbed, and two or three when you were counting hours. Ask what was present in the first set and missing from the second. Values found that way survive contact with a real job; values picked off a list often don't. One more caveat, because it changes what the exercise is for. A value you hold is not the same as a value you can currently act on. Valuing autonomy is only usable if you can run without close direction; valuing influence is only usable if you can bring people with you. Preference and capability are separate questions, and [the fit you are engineering](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/job-crafting/) needs both — so it is worth [gauging your current capabilities](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) alongside the values work rather than after it. The payoff is not abstract. Person-organization fit — the match between what you value and what an employer supplies — is reported as strongly linked to job satisfaction, commitment and intention to leave, in a meta-analysis of 172 studies cited by the Values Institute. ## The skills behind acting on what you find Notice that most of what makes this hard has little to do with vocabulary. Naming what you want is one problem; recognizing it honestly, and then changing something about your job because of it, are two more — and those are learnable in a way the list itself is not. **Setting Goals** is where work values live in this framework, and it treats them as non-negotiable: a job that violates yours will leave you unhappy regardless of what else it offers. What it adds to a shortlist is direction over a horizon you can see — not a ten-year plan built on a values statement, but stretches of six to eighteen months, letting the picture sharpen through what real work teaches you, and permission to leave a clear misfit early rather than waiting out a bad match. **Building Self-Awareness** keeps the exercise honest. Its core move is evidence over introspection: looking at how you actually work, how it makes you feel and what results you get, rather than trusting what you would like to be true. It also explains the borrowed-value problem at its root — an inflated need for achievement or approval can present itself convincingly as valuing status or teamwork. Feedback from people who have watched you work finds the gap between claimed and lived values faster than private reflection does. **Working with Your Manager** is where a named value finally changes something. Most people who discover they value autonomy or learning don't need a different employer; they need one prepared conversation about the content of their job. That is exactly this ground — shaping what you work on, agreeing where your decision-making authority sits, aligning expectations — plus the framing that makes such a request land as ambition rather than complaint. Three of the twelve skills this framework treats as buildable, then — and the open question is which would move things furthest for you right now. [A free skills assessment](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) will tell you in less time than the rating exercise took. ## This is already work you've started Some of this may have been familiar as you read it — a category that landed harder than the others, a trade-off you realized you have already made without deciding to. That recognition is the substance of the exercise; the list was only ever a prompt for it. None of it is fixed. The gap between knowing what you want from work and being able to arrange it is made of specific behaviors, and behaviors are learnable — you don't have to become a different person to close it, only a better-equipped version of the one you are. It also compounds: the further you go, the more expensive it gets to keep making these choices by default. You have done the part most people skip. Reading past the list, into the structure underneath it, is more thought than this question usually gets. The last piece is knowing where you stand. The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of all twelve work skills — the ones that decide whether you can act on what you have just worked out — and it takes about 7 minutes. You finish with a clear profile: what is already solid, what is worth building first, and which skills matter most for the direction you are weighing. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** Free, 7 minutes, and you get your results immediately. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Work values examples sorted into five types - intrinsic, extrinsic, social, prestige, lifestyle - plus how to turn a long list into a decision you can act on. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Setting Goals. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Working with Your Manager. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/work-values-examples/ Preferred summary: "Work values examples sorted into five types - intrinsic, extrinsic, social, prestige, lifestyle - plus how to turn a long list into a decision you can act on." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.