Five values underpin the framework, and they are 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 claim is stronger than it first appears, 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 value covers when present and when absent
Commitment. The Scrum Team commits to achieving its goals and to supporting each other. Present, a team treats the Sprint Goal as its own objective 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 a forecast nobody believes gets corrected. 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.
How the five values relate to the three pillars
Those five values are regularly confused with the three pillars of empiricism. The pillars 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.
The assessment tests the distinction by mixing the two lists, so both are worth being able to recite.
What commitment attaches to
Commitment is the one word in either list that the Guide uses twice. As a value it means the team committing to its goals and to one another. The value 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 second use attaches a commitment to each artifact. The Product Backlog has the Product Goal, the Sprint Backlog has the Sprint Goal and the Increment has the Definition of Done. Each of those three is a measure an artifact is held against, and none of them is one of the five values.
How the values appear in assessment questions
The values are most often tested indirectly, through a scenario in which a team is under pressure to hide a problem or take on work that dilutes the Sprint Goal. The value under test is usually openness or courage, and the correct answer is the one that surfaces the problem, because a team that absorbs it has removed the information the next inspection needed.
Nobody is given the job of enforcing the values. Scrum has no assessment event, no checklist and no way to instruct a team into courage. What a team can do is make the values safe to live, so the person who raises the unwelcome thing gets thanked for it.
What the Scrum Master does with the values
Somebody has to do the work of making the values safe to live, and the Guide leaves the Scrum Master closest to it, since the accountability is for the Scrum Team's effectiveness and a team that hides what it knows cannot be effective. The work that follows is coaching and example. A Scrum Master names the value a team is struggling with, asks the question nobody has asked and takes the cost of being the first to say the unwelcome thing so that somebody else can be the second.
What the Scrum Master cannot do is score a team against the list. The values are not a competency framework and there is no event in Scrum at which they are assessed, so a Scrum Master who rates each Developer on courage has invented a measure the framework does not contain. Progress shows instead in what the events produce. A Retrospective that reaches a real impediment is evidence of openness, and a Sprint Goal the Developers defend against a mid Sprint request is evidence of focus and commitment together.