There’s a dataset that most business leaders have never heard of, yet it contains some of the most powerful insights available about how people think, what they value, and how they’re likely to behave in professional settings. It’s called the World Values Survey, and it’s the foundation on which CultureFlow is built.
This isn’t a niche academic exercise. The World Values Survey (WVS) is the largest and longest-running cross-national study of human values and beliefs ever conducted. Understanding what it measures, and what it reveals, changes how you think about workplace culture, international teams, and cross-cultural management.
What the World Values Survey Is
The World Values Survey began in 1981, initially as an extension of the European Values Study. Over the past four decades, it has grown into a global research programme covering more than 100 countries, representing over 90% of the world’s population. It’s currently in its seventh wave of data collection.
The survey measures what people across the world actually believe, about authority, religion, gender, economic security, trust, individual autonomy, democracy, and dozens of other dimensions of human life. It doesn’t measure what governments say or what corporations claim. It measures what ordinary people, in their thousands, report about their own values and priorities.
The research is coordinated by an international network of social scientists and conducted through face-to-face interviews using standardised questionnaires. Each wave includes approximately 100,000 respondents across participating countries. The resulting dataset is freely available and has generated thousands of peer-reviewed publications.
In short: this is serious research with serious data behind it. And its implications for the workplace are profound but largely untapped.
The Two Dimensions That Map the World
The WVS data reveals that cultural variation across societies can be mapped along two major dimensions. This finding, most prominently articulated by political scientist Ronald Inglehart and his colleagues, forms the basis of the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map, one of the most widely reproduced visualisations in the social sciences.
Traditional vs Secular-Rational Values
This dimension captures the role of religion, authority, and tradition in a society.
Traditional values emphasise the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority, and conventional family structures. Societies strong in traditional values tend to favour obedience over independence, national pride over cosmopolitanism, and established hierarchies over egalitarian structures.
Secular-rational values emphasise the opposite: reason over faith, individual judgement over deference, and meritocratic over inherited authority. Societies strong in secular-rational values tend to be more comfortable with challenging established norms and less reliant on traditional institutions for social cohesion.
Survival vs Self-Expression Values
This dimension captures a society’s orientation towards economic and physical security versus individual agency and quality of life.
Survival values prioritise economic and physical security above all else. In societies where survival values dominate, people tend to be more risk-averse, more distrustful of outsiders, less tolerant of diversity, and more focused on material well-being. These values correlate with lower levels of subjective well-being and lower interpersonal trust.
Self-expression values prioritise individual autonomy, creativity, quality of life, and environmental concern. Societies strong in self-expression values tend to be more tolerant, more trusting, more open to new ideas, and more demanding of participation in political and economic decision-making.
These are not value judgements, one end of each dimension is not “better” than the other. They reflect different societal responses to different historical, economic, and institutional conditions. And they have direct, measurable consequences for how people behave at work.
How WVS Dimensions Map to Workplace Behaviour
This is where it gets practical. The values measured by the WVS don’t stay at the societal level. They show up in meetings, in email threads, in performance reviews, and in how people respond to leadership. Here are the connections that matter most.
Hierarchy Expectations
The traditional/secular-rational dimension is a strong predictor of attitudes towards hierarchy in the workplace. Employees from societies with strong traditional values are more likely to expect clear hierarchical structures, defer to senior leaders, and feel uncomfortable challenging a manager’s decisions, even when explicitly invited to do so.
In contrast, employees from secular-rational societies tend to expect flatter structures, more participatory decision-making, and the freedom to disagree openly with authority. When these two groups work together without understanding the difference, the result is predictable: one side sees the other as either “authoritarian” or “disrespectful,” depending on which direction the gap runs.
Communication Directness
The survival/self-expression dimension correlates with communication style in ways that directly affect team dynamics. Societies oriented towards survival values tend to produce more cautious, indirect communicators, people who hedge, imply, and read between the lines. This makes sense in environments where social cohesion and not offending the wrong person can be matters of genuine security.
Self-expression societies tend to produce more direct communicators, people who say what they mean, expect others to do the same, and interpret indirectness as evasiveness rather than politeness. Cross-cultural teams that mix these styles without acknowledgement generate constant low-level friction: one group feels the other is rude; the other feels the first is unclear.
Risk Tolerance and Innovation
Survival values correlate with risk aversion. People raised in environments where security is uncertain tend to favour proven approaches over experimentation. Self-expression values correlate with greater comfort with risk, ambiguity, and novelty. This has direct implications for innovation culture: a team composed of people from survival-oriented societies may resist rapid iteration or fail-fast methodologies, not because they lack creativity, but because their deep-seated values prioritise safety over experimentation.
Understanding this doesn’t mean accepting the status quo. It means managing change in a way that acknowledges where people are starting from, rather than assuming everyone shares the same baseline comfort with uncertainty.
Trust and Collaboration
Both WVS dimensions predict trust levels, but in different ways. Secular-rational, self-expression societies tend to show higher levels of generalised trust, trust in strangers, institutions, and new colleagues. Traditional, survival-oriented societies tend to show higher levels of particularised trust, trust in family, close friends, and established relationships.
In the workplace, this distinction matters enormously. A manager from a high-generalised-trust culture might assume that a new team will collaborate openly from day one. A team member from a high-particularised-trust culture may need weeks or months to build the relational foundation that makes genuine collaboration possible. Neither is wrong. But without understanding the difference, the manager concludes the employee is “not a team player,” and the employee concludes the organisation is superficial. Both are wrong, and both are acting rationally within their own cultural framework.
Attitudes to Work-Life Balance
Self-expression values correlate strongly with prioritising quality of life, personal fulfilment, and work-life balance. Survival values correlate with prioritising job security, income, and stability, even at the expense of personal time. When organisations implement well-being initiatives or flexible working policies, uptake often varies along cultural lines. This isn’t resistance to change; it’s a reflection of deeply held values about what work is for.
Why This Data Has Been Underused in Business
Given the richness and rigour of the WVS data, the obvious question is: why hasn’t business used it before?
The answer is partly structural. The WVS was designed by and for social scientists. Its data is published in academic formats, analysed with academic methods, and discussed in academic journals. Translating societal-level value patterns into individual-level workplace guidance requires significant interpretation, contextualisation, and tool-building.
It also requires a willingness to move beyond the cultural frameworks that business has traditionally relied on, most notably Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, which, while pioneering, are based on data from a single multinational corporation collected in the 1960s and 70s. The WVS offers a far larger, more recent, more representative, and continuously updated dataset. But it hasn’t had a platform to make it accessible and actionable for business users.
What CultureFlow Does With It
CultureFlow is, to our knowledge, the first platform to operationalise World Values Survey data specifically for workplace applications. We map WVS dimensions to practical workplace scenarios, hiring, onboarding, team composition, leadership development, cross-cultural communication, and provide actionable guidance based on empirical cultural data rather than stereotypes or outdated models.
This means that when you’re onboarding a new hire from a specific cultural background, you’re not relying on guesswork or generic “cultural tips.” You’re working with data drawn from the largest study of human values ever conducted, translated into specific, practical recommendations for your context.
Cultural intelligence has always been the goal. The World Values Survey provides the empirical foundation to make it real. CultureFlow is the bridge between the two: turning decades of rigorous research into tools that help organisations and individuals work more effectively across cultures, every day.