In my next job, I need…
Must-have 0 / 6Sorted 0 / 18
What work values are, in short
Work values are the things you need from a job to feel satisfied and stay motivated: a sense of achievement, independence, recognition, good relationships, support from the organisation, and decent working conditions. When a job meets your top values, you're more likely to be satisfied and to stay.
The six values here follow the Theory of Work Adjustment from the University of Minnesota, also used by the US government's O*NET career system. Limiting your must-haves matters: rating everything as important tells you nothing. The cards are our own wording.
By What's Your IQ · Reviewed 4 Oct 2026- Format
- 18 cards, 3 per value, sorted into 3 piles
- Scoring
- Must 2, nice 1, don't care 0; 0–6 per value
- Model
- Dawis & Lofquist, Theory of Work Adjustment (1984)
- Best used for
- Comparing job offers, career changes, interview questions
SORT SOME CARDS TO RANK THESE
Which jobs tend to offer what you value?
Every job rewards some values more than others. Compare your profile with ten example jobs. Click one to see where it fits and where it falls short.
YOUTHIS JOB
Sort the cards above to compare your values with this job.Job profiles are simplified illustrations to show how matching works, not official data. Individual roles and employers vary a lot.Achievement
Independence
Recognition
Relationships
Support
Working conditions
Fit → stayingmatters more than fit → performanceA large meta-analysis found that fit between a person and their job or organisation was strongly linked to satisfaction and commitment, and much more weakly to job performance.3
1970Measuring work values. Donald Super's Work Values Inventory was one of the first questionnaires to ask what people want from work, separate from what they're good at.1
1984Work adjustment. Dawis and Lofquist argued you stay in a job when it rewards your needs and you meet its demands, grouping 20 needs into the six values used here.2
1990sInto O*NET. The US Department of Labor built the same six values into its free career database, rating hundreds of occupations on each.
2005 · metaFit pays off. Kristof-Brown and colleagues pooled studies of person–job and person–organisation fit and found it mattered most for whether people were happy and planned to stay.3
- Super, D. E. (1970). Work Values Inventory. Houghton Mifflin.
- Dawis, R. V., & Lofquist, L. H. (1984). A psychological theory of work adjustment. University of Minnesota Press.
- Kristof-Brown, A. L., Zimmerman, R. D., & Johnson, E. C. (2005). Consequences of individuals' fit at work: A meta-analysis of person–job, person–organization, person–group, and person–supervisor fit. Personnel Psychology, 58(2), 281–342.