Five values underpin the framework, being Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect and Courage. The Guide is explicit that successful use of Scrum depends on people becoming more proficient in living them, and that the three empirical pillars come to life when these values are embodied by the Scrum Team.
That is a stronger claim than it looks, because it says the mechanics do not work on their own. A team that runs every event on schedule while keeping what it knows to itself is performing Scrum rather than using it.
What each one covers, present and absent
Commitment. The Scrum Team commits to achieving its goals and to supporting each other. Present, a team treats the Sprint Goal as something it intends to reach rather than something handed to it, and helps whoever is stuck. Absent, everyone finishes their own items while the Sprint Goal quietly fails.
Focus. The team's primary focus is on the work of the Sprint, to make the best possible progress toward those goals. Present, work gets finished before more is started, and a favour arriving mid Sprint is weighed against the Sprint Goal. Absent, six items sit at eighty per cent on the final day.
Openness. The Scrum Team and its stakeholders are open about the work and the challenges. Present, a problem is raised on the day it is found and an unrealistic forecast is corrected rather than repeated. Absent, the Sprint Review becomes a presentation and the Retrospective produces polite generalities.
Respect. Scrum Team members respect each other as capable, independent people, and are respected as such by those they work with. Present, disagreement stays about the work, and a decision inside somebody else's accountability is accepted by people who would have chosen otherwise. Absent, a stakeholder treats the Developers as an order queue.
Courage. Scrum Team members have the courage to do the right thing and to work on tough problems. Present, someone says the estimate is wrong in the room where it can still change, and the team takes the hard item. Absent, everyone agrees in the meeting and disagrees in the corridor.
Why they are not the pillars
The three pillars of empiricism are transparency, inspection and adaptation, and they describe how the process produces knowledge. The five values describe how people have to behave for that process to produce anything true, which is why the Guide says the pillars come to life when the values are embodied by the team.
The dependency is direct. Transparency is a claim about information, and information is only transparent if somebody was open enough to share it and brave enough to share it when it was unwelcome. Inspection is worth nothing if what is inspected was tidied up beforehand, and adaptation needs respect, since a team that will not accept a change arising from somebody else's judgement adapts nothing.
Exams test the distinction by mixing the two lists, so both are worth being able to recite.
What commitment attaches to
Commitment as a value is the team committing to its goals and to one another. It is not a promise to deliver every item pulled into the Sprint, and reading it that way turns the Sprint into a fixed scope contract.
The word has a second use in the Guide, where each artifact carries a commitment. The Product Backlog has the Product Goal, the Sprint Backlog has the Sprint Goal, and the Increment has the Definition of Done. Those are measures an artifact is held against rather than values people live.
Where they show up in questions
The values are most often tested indirectly, through a scenario where a team is under pressure to hide a problem or take on work that dilutes the Sprint Goal. The value being tested is usually openness or courage, and the correct answer is the one that surfaces the problem rather than absorbing it.
Nobody is given the job of enforcing them. There is no assessment event, no checklist and no way to instruct a team into courage. What can be done is to make them safe to live, so the person who raises the unwelcome thing is thanked rather than punished.