What Power Values Are
Power values are about having control. Control over resources, control over people, control over how you're perceived. In Shalom Schwartz's circumplex model of human values,tested across more than 80 countries and refined over decades,power sits as one of 10 universal value types. Schwartz identified it in 1992 and the framework has held up across cultures because these values reflect actual human concerns, not theoretical categories. Power values cluster around three things: authority (having say over others), wealth (having material resources), and status (having respect, recognition, influence). They're not about helping or belonging. They're about having.
In Schwartz's circular structure, compatible value types sit next to power on the wheel. Achievement values are adjacent,both involve coming out ahead, proving yourself, succeeding by competitive standards. Hedonism is also nearby, because both can involve taking what you want. But benevolence sits directly opposite power on the circumplex. That's not accidental. When someone ranks power high, benevolence tends to rank low. When someone ranks benevolence high, power pulls downward. These aren't random opposites. They represent fundamentally different answers to the question "What matters most?" Benevolence asks "How can I help?" Power asks "How can I win?"
How Power Shows Up in the Decisions That Matter
If you hold power values strongly, you probably don't experience them as sinister. You experience them as clarity. You see a project and think about who gets credit. You see a job offer and calculate salary and title before you think about the work. You notice rank. You notice who has it, who doesn't, where you stand. You want to move up. That's not greed in your mind,that's ambition, which feels righteous because winning at status and wealth is treated as normal achievement in most professional environments.
The cost is subtler than you might expect. It's not that pursuing power is wrong. It's that when power is your primary lens, other information doesn't register until it becomes undeniable. A team member's frustration reads as weakness, not as useful feedback. Your partner's request for more time at home competes with a promotion as if they're in the same category, which means you solve it by choosing the promotion and wondering why the resentment doesn't go away. A decision that gives you authority over a group feels like success, but the people under you are planning their exit. The information is there. You just didn't weight it as real because it wasn't about power.
The deeper issue is simpler: power values anchor to external measures. Your worth becomes tied to something outside yourself,title, money, recognition, how much authority you hold. That creates a perpetual gap. There's always someone higher. There's always more. The position you fought for gets old. The salary stops feeling like achievement and starts feeling like baseline. This isn't weakness. It's the structure of the value itself. It's chasing a target that moves because the target is external.
The Tension That Matters Most
The real conflict for someone with strong power values isn't between power and achievement,those values play well together, they reinforce each other. The conflict is between power and benevolence, and you feel it when you can't give both a real answer. Your child needs you present. Your employee needs autonomy. Your friend needs you to listen without solving. But you're built to direct, control, win. Being benevolent means accepting influence from others. It means the other person's needs matter as much as your goals. If power is how you've organized your whole sense of "doing well," accepting that framework can feel like failure.
This is where people often get stuck. They feel the conflict and assume they have to choose,either abandon the ambition or accept that relationships will suffer. But Schwartz's framework doesn't require you to choose one value type as your only one. Everyone has all 10 values in them. The question is which ones you've made primary, which ones you've minimized, and whether that distribution is still serving you. Some of the most effective leaders don't have high power values,they have high benevolence and self-direction, and they build authority by earning it rather than claiming it. Some people with moderate power values navigate both by being extremely clear about when they're competing (project work) and when they're not (family time), so the benevolence can actually operate in the right spaces.
The pattern keeps running because it has never been named. Most people with strong power values have never heard Schwartz's framework, never mapped their own values deliberately, never noticed the specific tension between how they're oriented and what the people around them actually need. They just get confused when winning keeps feeling hollow. When the title doesn't fix the marriage. When everyone reports to you but no one trusts you.
What to Notice
If power values are important to you, start paying attention to what happens after you win. After you get the promotion, after the salary goes up, after people acknowledge your authority. How long does it feel good? What comes next? That's not a moral failing,that's information. It's data about whether external measures are actually moving your satisfaction or just creating new gaps.
Also notice what you dismiss without really considering. Feedback that comes with emotion. Requests that ask you to give up authority. Situations where you can't control the outcome. These aren't obstacles to power,they're the actual content of relationships and complex work. The people who navigate both power and connection are usually the ones who've learned to see them as separate questions: "What do I need to accomplish here?" and "What do the people involved actually need?" Power values can answer the first question brilliantly. They make you clear about goals and relentless about execution. But they're not built to answer the second question. You need benevolence, or at least enough awareness of other people's value systems, to do that.
The My Values career values assessment will show you where power sits in your actual hierarchy, which other values sit next to it, and which values you're minimizing. That map is the beginning of making intentional choices instead of running the same pattern.
What does Schwartz mean by power as a value type?
In Schwartz's framework, power values specifically emphasize control over resources, people, and status. It's about having authority, wealth, and social recognition. Schwartz identified these as universal human concerns that appear across cultures, and they cluster as a distinct motivation that's measurable and compatible with some values while in tension with others.
Is having power values the same as being selfish?
Not necessarily. Power values mean you're motivated by authority and status, but that doesn't make you selfish,it makes you competitive and concerned with rank. Many people with high power values are generous with resources once they have them, and many contribute to their organizations in real ways. The issue isn't morality, it's that power values are externally anchored, so they can create chronic dissatisfaction even when you achieve what you aimed for.
Why does Schwartz put power and benevolence opposite each other?
Because they represent different answers to what matters. Benevolence prioritizes caring for others' welfare, even when it costs you. Power prioritizes your own control and status. The research shows that across cultures, people who rank one high tend to rank the other low, because investing heavily in both creates genuine conflict about whose needs take priority. They're not opposites because they can't coexist,they're opposites because the value systems operate from different premises.
Can you have high power values and still have good relationships?
Yes, but it requires awareness. Some people with high power values succeed relationally because they're explicit about boundaries,they compete at work and make space for other values at home. Others do it by developing enough self-direction and openness to experience that they can see people as separate from their need for authority. The problem is usually when power becomes the only lens for evaluating everything, including relationships.