Ethics-related value acculturation: the case of Thai employees working at UK and Japanese MNCs in Thailand
Cross Cultural & Strategic Management
ISSN: 2059-5794
Article publication date: 14 June 2022
Issue publication date: 20 September 2022
Abstract
Purpose
Multinational corporations (MNCs) at their foreign subsidiaries hire local employees, whose cultural values may differ from the organisations' home cultures. Such value differences may pose managerial difficulties, making it critical to observe whether working at MNCs changes local employees' cultural values, reducing these differences. This study investigates how and to what extent local employees from a collectivistic culture acculturate their ethics-related values when working at MNCs' foreign subsidiaries. The authors examine (1) whether local employees change their values to become closer to the MNCs' home cultures, and if so, (2) whether the cultural distance between the MNCs' home and host national cultures affect the degree of such adaptation.
Design/methodology/approach
Survey data were collected through stratified random sampling from Thai employees of a Japanese-owned MNC (n = 196), a UK-owned MNC (n = 143) and a Thai-owned organisation (n = 137), all operating in Thailand. Hypotheses were developed using Berry's bidimensional acculturation model and were tested using OLS and logistic regression analyses.
Findings
The study's findings indicate that MNCs' local employees from collectivistic cultures adopt Berry's integration acculturation strategy and acculturate their ethics-related values – collectivism, ethical relativism, collective responsibility preference and executive pay differentiation tolerance – towards the values prevalent in MNCs' home cultures. Overall, acculturation is greater when cultural distance is greater. New insights are presented in relation to collective responsibility preference and pay differentiation tolerance.
Originality/value
Findings add to current knowledge on acculturation in management by (1) providing new insights into value acculturation (2) utilising Berry's acculturation model to analyse employees' acculturation within an organisation in the context of an emerging economy, outside the more frequently studied topic of mergers and acquisitions, and (3) investigating the impact of cultural distance on the degree of employee acculturation outside the field of expatriate adjustment.
Keywords
Citation
Takeda, S., Secchi, D. and Bray, J. (2022), "Ethics-related value acculturation: the case of Thai employees working at UK and Japanese MNCs in Thailand", Cross Cultural & Strategic Management, Vol. 29 No. 4, pp. 846-869. https://doi.org/10.1108/CCSM-10-2020-0204
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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