Security in the System of Personal Values: Are People Who Strive for Security also Conservative?
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Abstract
People’s personal values and how to align them with business is an important topic in management. Research of personal values has identified a small set of basic values that form a dynamic circle of compatibilities and oppositions. In Schwartz’s prominent value theory, three basic values – tradition, conformity, and security – form a cluster of positively related values, together called conservation, and these values are psychologically incompatible with values of the opnness-to-change group such as stimulation and hedonism. This supports the common assumption that people who strive for tradition and conformity also emphasize security as a personal guiding principle. Other research, however, casts doubt on such a clear role of security within the system of values. We argue that when measuring security with instruments that ask people to rate the importance of security in general, thus not constructing a security index from items that only focus on a few particular components of security, people can use their own notions of security. We use eight representative surveys, with 24,000 respondents, collected in several German cities in between 1998 and 2022 to measure security and many of other values and value components. The data show that security is not incompatible with any basic value. Rather, security takes a central position in the configuration of different values and its components, relatively far from tradition but close to values such as social stability, reliable partners, hard work, and following the rules. Striving for security is, in particular, not incompatible with striving for change or for stimulation.
Keywords
Personal Security Values, SecurityPerson values
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