Search results

In this paper, the authors examine the role of idiocentric and allocentric cultural orientations in employees’ preference for relationship help and for emotional help from third parties in two cross-cultural samples. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the psychological dynamics of cultural dimensions in relation to cross-cultural conflict intervention.

The authors tested the theoretical assumptions by using questionnaire survey in two cross-cultural samples. Study 1 is a cross-cultural comparison within a country, including 83 Dutch employees and 106 Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands. Study 2 is a comparison between countries, including 123 Germany-based German employees and 101 Pakistan-based Pakistani employees.

The results show that employees’ allocentric orientation, but not idiocentric orientation, explains the differences in preference for relationship help in both the within-country comparison (Study 1: individualistic Dutch culture vs collectivistic Turkish culture) and the between-country comparison (Study 2: individualistic German culture vs collectivistic Pakistani culture). However, only in the between-country comparison (Study 2), the findings reveal that the difference in preference for emotional help between individualistic German culture and collectivistic Pakistani culture is mediated by idiocentric orientation (not by allocentric orientation).

The study confirms that the extent to which disputants’ preference for third-party help regarding social and personal aspects does differ across national cultures, and supports that the argument that social relationship is one of the paramount concerns in conflict handling in the collectivistic cultures. In addition, the study signals an alternative way of conducting two culture comparisons and expands our view on the cultural dimension of individualism-collectivism.

The findings have practical implications both for third-party intervention and for managing cultural diversity in the workplace.

In general, this study contributes to our understanding on how culture influences conflict handling and provides suggestions for third parties to be culturally adaptive.

The research demonstrates that culture plays an important role in determining the extent to which disputants favour relationship help and emotional help from third parties. The research is also valuable in terms of reliability. The authors tested the hypotheses in two cross-cultural samples both within a country and between countries.

In business and management, cross-national and cross-cultural comparisons between countries have been a topic of interest for many decades. Not only do firms engage in business in different countries around the world but also within countries. The population has become more diversified over time, making cross-cultural comparisons within country boundaries increasingly relevant. In comparisons across cultural groups, measurement invariance (MI) is a prerequisite; however, in practice, MI is not always attained or even tested. Our study consists of three parts. First, we provide a bibliometric analysis of articles on cross-cultural and cross-national topics in marketing to provide insight into the connections between the articles and the main themes. Second, we code articles to assess whether researchers follow the recommended steps as outlined in the multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) approach. The results indicate that MI testing is incorporated in the toolbox of many empirical researchers in marketing and that articles often report the level of invariance. Yet, most studies find partial invariance, meaning that some items are not comparable across the cultural groups studied. Researchers understand that MI is required, but they often ignore noninvariant items, which may decrease the validity of cross-cultural comparisons made. Third, we analyze the dissemination of MI in the broader literature based on co-citations with Steenkamp and Baumgartner (1998), a widely cited article on MI in the field of marketing. We conclude by noting methodological developments in cross-cultural research to enable addressing noninvariance and providing suggestions to further advance our insight into cross-cultural differences and similarities.

Notes that more than 20 years of cross‐cultural comparative research results have suggested that advertising content varies between countries which are culturally dissimilar. Tests the proposition that paired comparisons of countries will yield statistically significant differences for most country pairs. Reports that of the 55 country pairs used in this study, 100 per cent of the pairs resulted in statistically significant differences on at least nine of the 29 values examined and that subsequent analysis found that insignificant results can largely be attributed to cultural similarity. Points out, however, that even when countries are culturally similar, statistically significant results may still be found. Suggests that research which tests for between‐country differences may not be insightful without theoretical support for the comparisons.

Purpose: Prior work has convincingly argued that social inequalities arise from the basic human tendency to place others into social categories with different cultural meanings and to allocate resources unequally across those categories. However, few studies have sought to identify the micro-level mechanisms that sustain and justify this categorical inequality. In this research, I show how affect control theory (ACT) can be used to generate novel predictions about the interaction processes that perpetuate stratification.

Methodology/Approach: I present a series of analyses based in ACT that examine (1) whether categorical inequality is reflected in cultural sentiments for social groups, (2) whether patterns of normative behavior and social treatment vary based on category membership, and (3) whether interactions produce different emotions based on category membership.

Findings: Analysis 1 identifies four distinct patterns of cultural meanings that differentiate the groups studied. Analyses 2 and 3 show how these differences in cultural meanings produce categorical inequality through interpersonal behavior and emotional experiences in normative social encounters. Unequal cultural meanings for social groups correspond with their positionality in the social order and support patterns of situated behavior and emotions that keep groups with different levels of status and power separate and unequal.

Originality/Value: This research shows how social norms constrain and enable actions and emotions by members of different social categories, how they depend on the combinations of actors who appear together in a given social encounter, and how they contribute to the reproduction of inequality in ways not well accounted for by earlier work.

This paper aims to investigate the cultural variability in assessing the severity of a service failure.

Two separate studies were conducted. The first investigates differences in the perception of service failures across two cultural pools of subjects (allocentrics versus idiocentrics) and within a same country. The second contrasts two levels of comparisons: a cross-cultural values’ level and a cross-country level, to assess differences in the perception service failures’ severity.

Results showed that cultural values differences, when investigated at the individual level (i.e. idiocentrism versus allocentrism) are more significant to understand the influence of culture on the perception of severity, that is, allocentrics perceive more severity in the service failure than idiocentrics. However, a cross-country comparison (i.e. USA versus Puerto Rico) does not show significant differences.

Customers may assess, with different sensitivities, the severity of a service failure. These differences are mainly explained by differences in cultural values’ orientations but not differences across countries. Even originating from a same country, customers could perceive with different degrees the seriousness of a same service failure as they may cling to different cultural values. Hence, it is increasingly important to examine the cultural differences at the individual-level rather than a country level.

Firms serving international markets as well as multiethnic ones would have advantage to understand cultural differences in the perception of the severity at the individual level rather than at the societal or country level. This is more helpful to direct appropriate service recovery strategies to customers who may have higher sensitivity to the service failure.

Little is known about the effect of culture on the severity evaluation, although investigating cross-cultural differences in the assessment of severity is relevant to understand whether offenses are perceived more seriously in one culture than another and then if these offenses will potentially arise confrontational behaviors or not.

The purpose of this article is to develop an alternative approach to researching the impact of culture on relationship creation and network formation in Asian markets.

A conceptual approach is taken.

The paper has argued that in Asian markets culture can be better understood on the basis of cultural groupings (e.g. ethnic grouping) than on politically defined and artificially created national boundaries. The assessment and comparison of cultural differences and similarities in Asia can be conducted by using an “enlarged” emic approach. Given the idiosyncratic nature of relationships and the increasing significance of the emic contexts enriched by globalisation, the proposed approach is likely to generate a better understanding of the impact of culture on relationship creation and network formation in emerging Asian markets.

Managers doing business in emerging Asian markets need to go beyond traditional national culture stereotypes to capture cultural diversities and paradoxes in terms of, for example, ethnic culture, regional culture, professional culture, and emerging global culture groupings within and across national borders.

Differing from the “either/or” nature of the mainstream scholarship which tends to bipolarise national cultures, this paper emphasises the “both/and” character of Asian cultures which intrinsically embrace paradoxes in philosophies, values, and behaviours. The paper has suggested that an “enlarged” emic approach to cross‐cultural clustering and comparison be used in Asian contexts to better understand the workings of relationship creation and network formation in emerging Asian markets.

Emotion work can be defined as demands to display organizationally desired emotions regarding service-worker–customer interactions, as well as the psychological strategies necessary to regulate these emotional demands. This study applies a task-focused concept of emotion work and uses the Frankfurt Emotion Work Scales (FEWS) in a cross-cultural context to measure emotional work demands. The original German FEWS was translated into English and the extent to which the new English FEWS is equivalent to the original German FEWS is evaluated. Cultural effects on emotion work job demands are demonstrated by comparisons between a US (N=51) and German (N=202) travel agent sample. Cultural comparisons suggest that emotional demands in the US sales service include less emotional dissonance (i.e. the requirement to show emotions not actually felt in a situation) than in Germany. Survey results are discussed in terms of implications for further cross-cultural research.

Economic globalization is leading large companies to focus on international strategic management. Nowadays, the assets referred to as “corporate intangibles,” such as corporate reputation, are becoming increasingly important because they are considered a key factor for the viability of an organization, and companies therefore need to incorporate them into their scorecards for management. The problem is that their measurement is subjective and latent. These two characteristics impede direct international comparison and require demonstrating the accuracy of comparison via a minimum of two tests – construct equivalence and metric equivalence. As regards corporate reputation, construct equivalence was verified by Naomi Gardberg (2006). However, the subsequent studies did not address metric equivalence. Based on the results of a survey provided by the Reputation Institute (n = 5,950, 50 firms evaluated in 17 countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia), the degree of RepTrak metric equivalence has been tested, using two different methodologies, multigroup analysis (structural equation model), and a new technique from 2016, the Measurement Invariance of Composite Model procedure from the Partial Least Square Path Modeling family. As one would expect from other cross-cultural studies, reputation metrics do not meet the full metric equivalence, which is why they require standardization processes to ensure international comparability. Both methodologies have identified the same correction parameters, which have allowed validation of the mean and variance of response style by country.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the trajectory of cultural stereotypes on Uncertainty Avoidance emergent from two French multinational corporations. The exploration of respondents' comparisons of their own culture with other cultures illustrates that cultural stereotypes are derived from structural conditions that had developed over time, but came to be (mis)attributed to innate and prevalent cultural habits.

Data were collected from both primary and secondary sources, characterized by qualitative methodologies. Primary data respondents were predominantly ethnic Chinese Singaporeans, and secondary data respondents were predominantly French. In‐depth interviews were introduced in three phases.

The stereotype of the “uncertainty avoidant” Chinese Singaporean employees was employed by the top manager in one of the case studies (ECI) to lend legitimacy to the employees' exclusion from top management positions. The converse argument was made that “uncertainty avoidance” is absent among the French, who are hence more qualified as ECI top managers. Both claims were unfounded in this inquiry. Further evidence points to structural factors mediating employee behavior.

Structural factors were found to lend greater credibility in accounting for employee behaviors outlined in this study, more so than cultural ones. Future research surfacing complementary statistical insights will provide more concrete and representative evidence to this exploratory inquiry.

An alternative view of Uncertainty Avoidance through a structural account is proposed, based on evidence from qualitative inquiries.

Behavioral intention models are assumed to be universally applicable; however, recent criticisms have questioned their application among non‐Western subjects. It is argued that models that posit constructs that represent and measure the cultural nature of evaluative and normative latent constructs will best model intention formation in a culture. Thus, emic measures of etic latent constructs are required. A review of culturally‐influenced differences in reasoning processes between Chinese and Americans provides a theoretical basis to explore these models with samples from two cultures. Models considered Western, Oriental, and universal were compared with Hong Kong and US subjects. As predicted, the most Western model fit the USA data best and the most Oriental model fit the Hong Kong data best. Also as predicted, the measures of evaluation most representative of emic thought processes were most related to intention formation. Results suggest that the BI framework is applicable across cultures, yet must be operationalized with the distinctive thought processes of each culture in mind.