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Introduction
Research on work values has been driven primarily by interest in employees' motivation (Dose, 1997), and work values have been considered to have a substantial influence on employees' attitudes and behaviors (Locke, 1976; Meglino and Ravlin, 1998; Rokeach, 1973; Van den Broeck et al., 2011). Nevertheless, work values have generally been neglected in empirical studies on motivation. This negligence may have resulted from the lack of consensus about a definition of the concept (Dose, 1997; Meglino and Ravlin, 1998; Sagie et al., 1996). For example, England (1967) viewed work values as ideologies or philosophies; Meglino et al. (1991) defined them as socially desirable modes of behavior; and Locke (1976) regarded them as the importance that an individual attaches to a specific outcome.
Recently, however, scholars have made a breakthrough by differentiating research on values into two basic models: values as principles and values as preferences. While values as principles indicate “guiding principles regarding how individuals ought to behave,” values as preferences indicate “the preferences that individuals have for various environments” (Parks and Guay, 2009, p. 676). Work values as principles are apt to be influenced by social ethics and organizational or national culture, but work values as preferences may vary among employees within an organization or nation (Parks and Guay, 2009; Peterson and Barreto, 2014). Thus, for studies focused on individual employees' work values, as in this study, the concept of work values as preferences is more suitable than the concept of work values as principles.
The literature has further distinguished work values as preferences into two lower-order values: intrinsic work values and extrinsic work values (Gahan and Abeysekera, 2009; Park and Jang, 2017; Vansteenkiste et al., 2007). Intrinsic work values refer to the extent to which employees consider the outcomes obtained from work itself, such as meaningfulness and self-actualization, to be important, whereas extrinsic work values describe the degree to which employees consider material benefits, job security or social relationships to be important (Huo and Boxall, 2018). Stated differently, intrinsic work values are concerned with content-related values, and extrinsic work values are concerned with context-related values (Krumm et al., 2013). Since previous studies (e.g. Park and Jang, 2017; Vansteenkiste et al., 2007) found that positive outcomes were more...