In the literature on international organizations their employees, as well as their values and motivations, play a marginal role. For various strands of international relations theories, the conception of international organizations did not leave much room for staff members and their behaviors. More recently, however, several theoretical approaches and specific theories on particular aspects of international organizations suggest that many phenomena are hard to understand without looking inside these organizations, and thus to focus on employees. A main issue in this new work is whether values and motivations differ across types of organizations and whether they are the result of a socialization process. Based on our own survey of several diverse organizations we find differences between humanitarian and technical organizations, while there appears no evidence that this is due to socialization in the workplace, but more likely due to self-selection by the employees.