The World Values Survey: The Deepest Layer of Cultural Difference, and Why Leaders Miss It

Most executives I work with have heard of Hofstede. Some have encountered GLOBE. Almost none have heard of the World Values Survey, and yet it is arguably the most important piece of the cross-cultural picture for anyone who needs to understand not just how people behave at work, but why.

Hofstede and GLOBE measure cultural practices and values as they show up in professional contexts, power relationships, uncertainty tolerance, achievement orientation. The World Values Survey measures something deeper: the foundational beliefs that a society holds about what makes a good life, what institutions deserve trust, and whether individual autonomy or collective security is the more fundamental human priority.

These are the values that take generations to shift. They survive organisational culture change programmes. They outlast leadership transitions. And they shape the professional context you operate in at a level that no amount of training on “communication styles” will reach, because they are not about communication style. They are about what people fundamentally believe they are working for.

What Is the World Values Survey?

The World Values Survey is a global research programme launched by political scientist Ronald Inglehart in 1981. Now in its seventh wave (2017–2022), it has surveyed respondents in 87 countries covering more than 90 percent of the world’s population. It is the most geographically comprehensive values research programme in existence.

Unlike Hofstede and GLOBE, which were developed specifically for organisational and management contexts, the WVS measures broad societal values, attitudes toward authority, religious belief, gender roles, environmental values, political participation, and institutional trust. The data is publicly available and has been used by researchers across economics, political science, sociology, and, increasingly, leadership development.

The framework that most directly derives from the WVS is the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map, which organises countries on two axes:

Traditional vs Secular-Rational values. Traditional societies emphasise religion, national pride, deference to authority, and the absolute importance of parent-child relationships. Secular-Rational societies are more comfortable questioning authority, show lower emphasis on religion and family as social anchors, and tend toward economic and political rationalism. This axis predicts, among other things, how people relate to institutional authority, including the authority of organisational hierarchy.

Survival vs Self-Expression values. This is the axis I find most diagnostically valuable for leadership coaching. Survival-oriented cultures prioritise economic and physical security, conformity to social norms, and wariness of outsiders. Self-Expression-oriented cultures prioritise autonomy, individual quality of life, civic participation, and interpersonal trust. This axis predicts, with remarkable consistency, what people are actually willing to work for, and what kind of leadership they will find motivating rather than merely compliant.

The Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass also incorporates a third WVS-derived measure: Institutional Confidence, the degree to which a society’s population trusts its major institutions (government, legal system, corporations, civil service). This dimension turns out to be surprisingly predictive for leadership, for reasons I will come to.

Why WVS Is Different From the Other Frameworks

The simplest way to put it: Hofstede and GLOBE measure how culture shows up in the workplace. The WVS measures what people bring to the workplace from their wider societal experience.

That distinction matters most in two situations.

First, when the professional context has changed faster than the underlying values. An organisation can adopt flat hierarchy, direct communication norms, and performance-based culture. It can train managers in Dutch-style directness or German-style procedural rigour. But the individuals in that organisation still carry their WVS-level values into every interaction. A Chinese professional working in a Dutch organisation for eleven years will have adapted significantly on the surface. The WVS Self-Expression score gap between China (40) and the Netherlands (86), a Δ46 on a 0–100 scale, does not close in eleven years. It represents a generational difference in the depth of values. Knowing that it is still there, still active under pressure, and still shaping what that person experiences as meaningful work, that is coaching-level insight.

Second, when you are trying to understand trust. Institutional Confidence is one of the most underrated dimensions in the cross-cultural toolkit. It answers the question: to what degree does this person’s background incline them to extend default trust to institutions, contracts, and professional credentials, versus requiring that trust to be built through personal relationship?

China scores 82 on Institutional Confidence. The Netherlands scores 58. Spain scores 34.

When a Spanish professional appears to require an unusually deep personal relationship before a business deal can progress, it is often read as Southern European warmth or negotiating style. It is more precisely described as a rational adaptation to a history of low institutional reliability. In Spain, personal loyalty has historically substituted for institutional trust because institutions have not always been reliable. This is not a cultural quirk. It is a structurally coherent response to a social environment. Understanding it through the WVS lens changes how you build the relationship, and how long you allow for it.

The Inglehart-Welzel Map: What It Actually Shows

The Cultural Map is the most intuitive visualisation in cross-cultural research. Countries cluster geographically and historically in ways that confirm what any seasoned international executive already senses, and then reveal the specific dimensions that explain it.

The Protestant European cluster (Scandinavia, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland) occupies the top-right quadrant: high Secular-Rational, high Self-Expression. These societies are post-materialist in orientation. Economic security is assumed. What people work for is autonomy, self-realisation, and quality of life. Leadership in this cluster must offer meaningful work and genuine autonomy, not just compensation. The Dutch MAS score of 14 (the lowest in Hofstede’s dataset) is not an accident. It is the organisational expression of a WVS Self-Expression score of 86.

The Confucian cluster (China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) occupies the right side of the map but significantly lower on Self-Expression. These societies have moved substantially toward Secular-Rational values, they are not traditional in the religious or nationalistic sense, but they remain more Survival-oriented. Collective security, family obligation, and institutional loyalty remain more central. A manager who assumes that a Chinese direct report is motivated by the same self-expression and autonomy needs as a Dutch colleague is misreading the situation at a foundational level.

The Catholic European cluster (Spain, Italy, France, Portugal) occupies a middle position on both axes. More traditional than Protestant Europe on some dimensions, but with high Self-Expression scores that reflect decades of post-industrial social liberalisation. This cluster’s low Institutional Confidence scores, Spain at 34, Italy and France similarly low, are the key leadership signal. These are societies where personal relationship has had to substitute for institutional reliability for a long time. The professional expectation that warm relationships precede productive collaboration is not inefficiency. It is structural intelligence.

Three Things the WVS Reveals That Other Frameworks Miss

1. Whether individual autonomy or collective security is the default orientation.

The Survival vs Self-Expression axis directly predicts whether a professional will be more energised by freedom, variety, and self-directed challenge, or by stability, belonging, and clearly defined expectations. Neither orientation is better. But designing a team structure, a development programme, or a performance conversation without knowing where your people sit on this axis means you are optimising for the wrong motivational profile.

A high Self-Expression team will disengage if over-managed, under-trusted, or given insufficient space to influence their own work. A high Survival team will feel anxious, underperforming, and unsupported if expected to self-direct without clear frameworks, sufficient safety, and explicit leadership presence. The WVS axis shows you which problem you are managing.

2. How much of your institutional credibility will transfer automatically, and how much you need to earn personally.

This is the Institutional Confidence dimension, and it is one I use constantly in coaching senior leaders preparing for international assignments.

When a Dutch leader arrives in a Chinese or Japanese context, their institutional credibility, the weight of their title, their company’s reputation, the formal contract, carries significant authority. Institutional confidence is high. The relationship can come after the professional credentials have established trust. When the same leader arrives in a Spanish, Greek, or Latin American context, the institutional credibility does not carry the same weight. The personal relationship has to come first, because institutions, including the one they represent, do not automatically earn trust.

Getting this sequence wrong is one of the most common executive derailments I see in international assignments. The leader arrives in a low institutional confidence context, presents their credentials, expects the professional trust to follow, and then interprets the other party’s relational investment as either time-wasting or social nicety. It is neither. It is the precondition for the professional trust they are waiting for.

3. How quickly the cultural distance will close with adaptation, and what will remain.

WVS values change on generational timescales, not on individual ones. A professional who has spent a decade in a new cultural context may have adapted their communication style, their meeting behaviour, and their management approach significantly. The WVS Self-Expression and Institutional Confidence values they carry are far more stable. They are not stubbornly retained, they are structurally embedded. They shaped the person’s world before they ever entered a professional context.

This is why the eleven-year adaptation factor I discuss in the China-Netherlands report is so important to frame correctly. The professional surface has adapted. The WVS-level values have not, and they resurface under pressure, in moments of ambiguity, and in the relationship dynamics that are most personally significant.

WVS in the Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass

The Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass plots each country on the Traditional-Secular and Survival-Self-Expression axes, visualising them on the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map alongside each other. For many users, this is the single most intuitive moment in the tool, seeing exactly where your two countries sit in relation to each other, and to the wider cluster of cultures around them.

The Institutional Confidence dimension feeds directly into the Trust section of the leadership analysis. When the WVS gap on Institutional Confidence is large between two countries, the report flags the trust-building sequence as a priority leadership dimension, because getting that sequence right or wrong is often the difference between an international relationship that works and one that stalls inexplicably.

Where the WVS provides its most distinctive value in the Compass is in the Convergence analysis, the cross-framework synthesis that identifies where multiple frameworks independently confirm the same gap. The Survival-Self-Expression gap between China and the Netherlands (Δ46) is confirmed by the Hofstede Individualism gap (Δ60) and the Schwartz Affective Autonomy gap (Δ34). Three independent frameworks, three different methodological traditions, all pointing to the same structural truth: the gap in how centrally individual autonomy and self-expression feature in professional motivation is one of the most fundamental differences in this pairing. Not the only one. But the convergent signal makes it the highest-confidence gap to address first.

The Practical Implication

Here is what I want executives to take from the WVS that they do not typically get from Hofstede alone.

The cultural differences that matter most in your international leadership relationships are not primarily about communication style, meeting norms, or hierarchy preferences. Those are real and they matter, Hofstede and GLOBE address them well. But underneath those differences are deeper questions about what people believe they are working for, whether they extend default trust to institutions or require it to be earned personally, and whether autonomy or security is the more fundamental professional motivation.

When you understand those deeper layers, the surface-level differences stop being surprising. You stop asking why your Spanish stakeholder needs three more dinners before the contract moves forward, or why your Dutch direct report disengages when you manage too closely, or why your Chinese colleague presents an optimistic picture in every status update even when you know the project is in trouble. The WVS does not explain everything. But it explains the layer that explains the surface.

Where to Start

The World Values Survey data for your country pair, alongside Hofstede, GLOBE, and Schwartz, is in the Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass, free to use.

The WVS tab plots your two countries on the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map, shows the bar chart comparisons on all three WVS dimensions, and provides an insight card on the most operationally significant gap for your specific pairing.

The Convergence tab shows you where the WVS findings are confirmed by the other three frameworks, the high-confidence signals that are worth building your leadership preparation around.

If you want the full analysis, how the WVS gaps translate into trust architecture, relationship sequencing, and motivational design for your specific professional context, the 11-dimension leadership report takes you there.

Use the Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass →

Jan Salomons is an executive coach and leadership developer based in the Netherlands, with 35+ years of senior management experience including a decade at ASML. The Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass integrates Hofstede, GLOBE, World Values Survey, and Schwartz into a single analytical tool for leaders and coaches working across cultural boundaries.

Haerpfer, C., Inglehart, R., Moreno, A., Welzel, C., Kizilova, K., Diez-Medrano, J., Lagos, M., Norris, P., Ponarin, E. & Puranen, B. (eds.) (2022). World Values Survey: Round Seven, Country-Pooled Datafile Version 5.0. Madrid, Spain & Vienna, Austria: JD Systems Institute & WVSA Secretariat. DOI: 10.14281/18241.20