Development and Validation of the Work Values Scale Evat 30

This paper presents the process of development and initial validation of an instrument for measuring work values. The construct structure is based on the Schwartz's Universal Theory of Values. Three items were used to operationalize each of 10 typologies proposed by the Theory. The 30 items describe day-to-day situations of the work context, where fictitious employees put into practice their work values. In order to validate the structure and to identify the most representative items for each high-order value, two samples in different cultures were used, one of Mexican employees (N=169) and the other of Spanish (N=77). In the first step, and using multidimensional scaling (MDS), those items with equivalent meaning in both cultures were identified. In a second phase all those items considered as equivalent were subject to Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA's), to recognize which of them were able to represent the hypothesized structure. A dynamic structure of four high-order values represented by 4 items for each value obtained the best goodness of fit. Good reliability was obtained for each scale