# Work Styles Across 186 U.S. Professional Occupations: O*NET 31.0 Evidence

> O*NET 31.0 evidence across 186 occupations compares exploration, agency, social orientation, reliability and resilience for development and role design.

- Canonical page: https://mtfinstitute.com/insights/work-styles-186-us-professional-occupations-onet-31/
- Content type: Article
- Editorial category: Research & Reports
- Publisher: MTF Institute of Management, Technology and Finance
- Author: MTF Institute Editorial Team- Published: 2026-09-24
- Updated: 2026-09-24
- Language: English
- Topics: Management development, Leadership Development, O*NET, Occupational Research, Work Styles

Work styles that matter for one occupation do not have the same performance impact in another. In O*NET 31.0, reliability has the highest median of five original MTF indices across 186 U.S. management, business, technology, engineering and legal occupations. Management has the highest median agency, social, resilience and overall profile indices; computer and mathematical occupations have the highest median exploration index; legal has the highest median reliability and resilience, although its seven-observation group is small.

This report analyses 21 O*NET Work Styles Impact measures and groups them into five transparent descriptive indices: exploration, agency, social orientation, reliability and resilience. The result is not a personality test or a ranking of people. It is an occupational evidence map for designing development, selection questions, team complements and human-AI work.

## Research question

How do the performance impacts of 21 work styles vary across 186 detailed occupations in five U.S. professional groups, and what practical decisions can learners, managers and curriculum designers make from those patterns?

The subsidiary questions are:

1. Which work-style families have the highest median impact across the sample?
2. How do group medians differ?
3. Which occupations lead each descriptive index?
4. How should the evidence affect development and role design without turning occupational averages into individual stereotypes?

## Direct answer and key findings

Across all 186 valid occupations, the median reliability index is 2.337 on O*NET's Work Styles Impact scale of -3 to +3. The medians are 1.633 for agency, 1.613 for exploration, 1.393 for resilience and 0.698 for the social index. The median of the five-index overall profile is 1.539.

Management's median overall profile is 1.767, the highest group result. It also leads agency at 2.052, social at 1.192 and resilience at 1.845. Computer and mathematical occupations lead exploration at 1.975. Legal leads reliability at 2.607 and resilience at 2.195, but the legal sample contains only seven occupations and should be interpreted cautiously.

Computer and information research scientists lead exploration at 2.520. Chief executives lead agency at 2.714. Education and childcare administrators for preschool and daycare lead the social index at 2.172. Nuclear engineers lead reliability at 2.922. Emergency management directors lead resilience at 2.810 and the overall five-index profile at 2.334.

The practical lesson is complementarity. A role can require high exploration and reliability at the same time. Management combines agency and social impact with reliability, while research and engineering roles can emphasise exploration and precision. Development should target the work-style demands of the role and the person's demonstrated gap; it should not ask everyone to imitate an undifferentiated executive stereotype.

## Data source

The analysis uses the [O*NET 31.0 database](https://www.onetcenter.org/db_releases.html), the current production release published in August 2026 by the U.S. Department of Labor-sponsored O*NET programme. O*NET describes work styles as personality tendencies exhibited at work that can affect performance. The official [Work Styles browser](https://www.onetonline.org/find/descriptor/browse/1.D) provides definitions and occupation ratings.

The archival package preserves the official `Occupation Data.txt`, `Work Styles.txt`, `Scales Reference.txt`, `Content Model Reference.txt` and related source files used for reproduction. O*NET data are available under the licence stated by the O*NET Resource Center.

## Population, inclusion and exclusions

The intended population was every detailed occupation in five O*NET-SOC major groups: Management (11), Business and Financial Operations (13), Computer and Mathematical (15), Architecture and Engineering (17), and Legal (23). These groups support comparison with recent MTF occupational studies while spanning executive, analytical, technical, engineering and legal work.

The occupation table contained 214 titles in scope. Twenty-eight residual, aggregate or otherwise unrated titles lacked complete Work Styles Impact values for all 21 selected styles. They were excluded rather than imputed. The final sample contains 186 distinct occupations: 45 management, 45 business and financial operations, 36 computer and mathematical, 53 architecture and engineering, and seven legal occupations.

No occupation was removed because its values looked surprising. The archive records every excluded code and missing style. Most included source rows are dated December 2025 and list the O*NET domain source supplied in the database; the occupation-level file preserves dates and source labels.

## Measures and the WI scale

O*NET 31.0's Work Styles table supplies two scales. This report uses Work Styles Impact (`WI`), with a defined minimum of -3 and maximum of +3. Higher values indicate that the style has a more positive impact on performance in the occupation. Zero is not “absence of personality”; negative values do not mean a person with that tendency is bad. They indicate the modelled direction of performance impact for that occupation.

The 21 styles are grouped as follows:

- **Exploration:** Innovation, Intellectual Curiosity, Tolerance for Ambiguity and Adaptability.
- **Agency:** Achievement Orientation, Initiative, Self-Confidence, Perseverance and Leadership Orientation.
- **Social:** Humility, Sincerity, Empathy, Cooperation, Optimism and Social Orientation.
- **Reliability:** Cautiousness, Attention to Detail, Dependability and Integrity.
- **Resilience:** Stress Tolerance and Self-Control.

Each index is the unweighted arithmetic mean of its component WI values for an occupation. The overall profile index is the unweighted mean of the five indices. These indices are original MTF descriptive devices, not O*NET scales. Equal weighting provides transparency but is not a validated predictive model. Readers should inspect components and local job evidence rather than use the overall number alone.

## Group results

| Occupational group | n | Exploration | Agency | Social | Reliability | Resilience | Overall |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| Management | 45 | 1.442 | 2.052 | 1.192 | 2.230 | 1.845 | 1.767 |
| Legal | 7 | 1.027 | 1.458 | 0.858 | 2.607 | 2.195 | 1.641 |
| Computer and Mathematical | 36 | 1.975 | 1.419 | 0.500 | 2.369 | 1.135 | 1.483 |
| Architecture and Engineering | 53 | 1.830 | 1.530 | 0.453 | 2.333 | 1.075 | 1.458 |
| Business and Financial Operations | 45 | 1.170 | 1.580 | 0.848 | 2.397 | 1.540 | 1.456 |

Management's profile supports development that combines direction, influence, reliability and work under pressure. It does not imply that managers are “better” at these styles. The data describe which tendencies are modelled as more beneficial to occupational performance.

Computer and mathematical work has the highest group exploration median, consistent with the prominence of innovation, curiosity, ambiguity and adaptability across many technical roles. Reliability remains high at 2.369, showing that exploration and disciplined execution are not opposites.

Architecture and engineering has a similar pattern: high exploration and reliability, lower social and resilience medians in the five-index construction. That does not mean engineers do not cooperate or face pressure. It means the selected styles have different occupational impact profiles.

Business and financial operations show high reliability and moderate agency and resilience. Legal leads reliability and resilience, but the group median can move materially because there are only seven observations.

## Exploration leaders

The top five exploration occupations are computer and information research scientists (2.520), nanosystems engineers (2.500), video game designers (2.395), blockchain engineers (2.353), and bioengineers and biomedical engineers (2.312).

These occupations reward learning, new perspectives and comfort with uncertainty. Yet exploration should not be confused with unrestricted experimentation. Research and engineering still depend on evidence, safety, validation and documentation. A strong development task combines an open question with a disciplined test and a record of rejected alternatives.

For AI-assisted work, exploration may benefit from broader ideation and rapid synthesis, while reliability controls source quality, evaluation and release. The occupational profile encourages a paired design rather than a simple “creative versus careful” dichotomy.

## Agency leaders

Chief executives lead agency at 2.714, followed by legislators (2.458), sales managers (2.424), general and operations managers (2.398), and emergency management directors (2.370).

The agency index combines achievement orientation, initiative, self-confidence, perseverance and leadership orientation. These styles can support decisive action. They can also create overreach if authority, evidence and challenge are weak. Development should therefore connect agency with decision boundaries, feedback and retrospective review.

A useful assessment is not “Are you a natural leader?” Ask for a case where the person initiated action under uncertainty, named the trade-off, involved affected parties, changed course when evidence contradicted the plan and remained accountable for the result.

## Social leaders

Education and childcare administrators for preschool and daycare lead the social index at 2.172, followed by funeral home managers (2.153), social and community service managers (2.117), arbitrators, mediators and conciliators (2.057), and credit counsellors (2.035).

These roles make the human context visible. Social effectiveness is not the same as being agreeable. It can require empathy, cooperation, sincerity and the ability to work through grief, conflict, vulnerability or public responsibility.

Team design should recognise social labour. If an AI system reduces visible interaction but transfers difficult explanations or exceptions to a smaller human team, workload and capability must be reconsidered rather than assumed to disappear.

## Reliability leaders

Nuclear engineers lead reliability at 2.922, followed by regulatory affairs managers (2.903), treasurers and controllers (2.873), information security engineers (2.860), and security management specialists (2.857).

The combination of cautiousness, attention to detail, dependability and integrity is especially beneficial where evidence, control and consequence matter. Reliability is the highest median index across the whole sample. This challenges a fashionable but incomplete idea that future-ready work is mainly creativity and speed.

For selection and development, request artifacts such as reconciliations, control records, test evidence, exception handling and disclosure of uncertainty. Do not infer integrity from a self-rating. Evaluate conduct through fair, job-related evidence and references where lawful.

## Resilience leaders

Emergency management directors lead resilience at 2.810. Chief executives and coroners both score 2.480, followed by nuclear engineers at 2.435 and judges, magistrate judges and magistrates at 2.420.

The index uses stress tolerance and self-control. It should never be used to justify chronic overload or unsafe staffing. High occupational impact can indicate that the organisation must provide strong systems, recovery, escalation and wellbeing support.

Resilience development should include simulation, clear authority, checklists, debrief and recovery, not motivational pressure. Remove avoidable stressors before asking individuals to absorb more.

## Overall profile leaders

Emergency management directors have the highest overall profile at 2.334, followed by chief executives (2.152), medical and health services managers (2.108), legislators (2.092), and education administrators for kindergarten through secondary school (2.053).

The ranking reflects breadth across the five indices, not occupational worth, pay, education or future demand. It is sensitive to the original grouping and equal weights. Use it to locate complex combinations, not to order careers.

Emergency management illustrates the combination: exploration under changing conditions, agency, stakeholder coordination, reliability and resilience. Training that develops only command presence would miss evidence, cooperation and disciplined control.

## A STYLE-5 development method

Use five steps.

**Specify the target work.** Select a real occupation or role and list its decisions, stakeholders, controls and conditions. Do not begin with a generic personality label.

**Translate indices into behaviours.** Exploration can mean generating alternatives and testing assumptions. Agency can mean initiating a bounded action. Social can mean eliciting affected perspectives. Reliability can mean maintaining traceable evidence. Resilience can mean applying a protocol under pressure and recovering.

**Inventory evidence.** For each behaviour, record a work sample, observed case, result and limitation. Self-description alone is weak.

**Learn through a bounded assignment.** Choose one gap and a real task that does not expose customers, employees or the organisation to unreviewed risk.

**Evaluate and rebalance.** Ask a qualified reviewer to compare the work with role requirements. Strengthen the weakest material behaviour while preserving existing strengths.

## Implications for career planning

Compare the occupation-level profile with the actual target employer. If the target role is a management promotion, agency and social demands may rise while reliability remains essential. A technical specialist moving into research leadership may need more stakeholder and authority practice without reducing exploration.

Do not select a career solely because an index matches a self-image. Occupational demand, pay, access, values, education, disability accommodations and local opportunity also matter. The data describe work-style impact, not individual fit.

## Implications for hiring and assessment

Use job analysis before assessment. Translate material styles into observable, lawful and relevant evidence. A structured question for adaptability might ask about a changed constraint, options considered, evidence used, action and result. A reliability exercise might require reviewing a flawed record and documenting checks.

Avoid personality determinism. O*NET occupational averages cannot determine whether one person will perform. Assessments should be validated for the intended use, accessible, consistently administered and reviewed for adverse impact under applicable law.

## Implications for teams and AI-enabled work

AI can increase search, drafting and option generation. It can also introduce confident errors, provenance gaps and inconsistent action. The research suggests pairing exploration with reliability, and agency with governance and social review.

For an agentic workflow, specify approved sources, tools, actions, human approval points, evaluation cases, logs and stop authority. Ask which work styles the redesigned human role now requires. If automation removes routine work but leaves exceptions, resilience and reliability may become more important rather than less.

The [NIST AI Risk Management Framework](https://airc.nist.gov/airmf-resources/airmf/5-sec-core/) provides voluntary Govern, Map, Measure and Manage functions for risk work. It does not validate the MTF indices; it supports the practical requirement to keep accountability and measurement visible.

## Robustness and limitations

This is descriptive analysis. It does not estimate causal effects, employee performance or future change. The WI values are occupational impact estimates, not survey scores for individuals. Source dates and methods vary by occupation; many included rows are dated December 2025 and use the O*NET domain source shown in the archive.

The five indices are original, equally weighted and not psychometrically validated. Different groupings or weights would change values and ranks. Social contains six styles while resilience contains two; averaging within dimensions reduces but does not eliminate construct choices. The overall profile gives each dimension equal weight regardless of component count.

The legal group has seven observations. Group medians conceal variation. Twenty-eight titles lacked complete selected data and were excluded; no values were imputed. Results are not weighted by employment, openings, pay or economic output.

O*NET is U.S.-oriented. International transfer requires local job analysis. The report must not be used as an automated employment decision, diagnosis or personality test.

## Reproducibility and review

The archival package contains the official O*NET source tables, analysis code, occupation-level values and indices, group summary, dimension leaders, top and bottom tables, method, README, review record and final searchable PDF. `analysis.json` preserves exact sample counts, exclusions, medians and rankings.

The version of record is archived on Zenodo under [DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22937065](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22937065). The record includes the [searchable report PDF](https://zenodo.org/records/22937065/files/MTF-RR-2026-09-24-01.pdf?download=1), a reproducibility bundle and the exact O*NET source-table archive used for the calculations. Readers can therefore inspect both the reported findings and the transformation path from source rows to the five indices.

The report is authored by the MTF Institute Editorial Team. An editorial methods review checked source-release alignment, scale interpretation, sample logic, calculations, limitations, word count and metadata. The archive preserves the signed review record and file checksums.

## Practical next step

Choose one target occupation in the archived CSV. Read its 21 component values, not only the indices. Translate the two most material gaps into observable behaviours and build one reviewed work sample over the next 30 days. Reassess with actual role evidence.

> ### Develop integrated executive capability
> The [Advanced Executive Management and Business Administration programme](https://mtfinstitute.com/programs/advanced-executive-management-business-administration/#enroll) is the most relevant MTF Institute programme for readers who need structured practice across strategy, finance, operations, people, technology and execution. Use the occupation profile to identify development questions, then verify the programme curriculum and terms. Occupational averages and credentials do not replace job analysis or demonstrated performance.



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