Search results

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how newcomers’ perceptions of organisational culture can change over time. The study tries to address whether initial working experience changes newcomers’ perceptions about the ideal organisational culture, and whether these perceptions converge with those of their supervisors.

A longitudinal survey was carried out on a sample of undergraduate students to measure shifts in their perceptions of organisational culture over time. In order to interpret the results in terms of actual organisational culture, a survey was also conducted with the students’ immediate supervisors.

Applying a factor analytic procedure to the aggregate sample of study, the items of an existing scale were reduced to a six-dimensional structure. Based on the results of statistical analysis, the study revealed that initial working experience might affect students’ perception of organisational culture and make these perceptions converge with those of their immediate managers. Specifically, the students’ perceptions about the importance of stability and success orientation dimensions changed over time. By the end of the process, they found supportiveness and people orientation more important, similarly to their supervisors.

This study reveals the critical role of supervisors in the transmission of organisational culture to newcomers. Additionally, it demonstrates the importance of work-based learning for acquiring work-related and technical beliefs, as well as obtaining initial ideas about the culture of a real organisation.

The study can specifically contribute to the growing literature on organisational culture by demonstrating the impact of initial working experience on newcomers’ perceptions, and how they adopt the culture of their new organisations to become a part of this culture.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate perceptions of fairness of a standardized performance appraisal in a multinational enterprise. The paper looks at the first step in understanding fairness perceptions by examining whether national culture influences the view on standardization itself and by comparing China, Lithuania, and Norway.

An experiment using a scenario that outlined a performance appraisal tool in a multinational company is conducted. National culture and individual cultural values are the independent variables and the perception of fairness of the practice is the dependent variable. A sample of 80 management respondents from Lithuania, China, and Norway is taken.

The findings suggest that national culture influences perceptions of fairness of a standardized performance appraisal tool. Employees from countries undergoing profound economic and political change, that score low on the cultural dimension of self‐expression, tend to see the standardized tool as more fair than employees from a stable country high on self‐expression. Differences in fairness perception at the individual level are found, where respondents high on power distance had higher perceptions of fairness of a standardized tool. Both national and individual levels measures of culture affected perceptions.

The sample is small; however, the differences are strong and indicate that perceptions of fairness vary. The experimental design allows good control, although it can limit generalizability to the field.

Multinational companies must understand that before analysis and choice of specific human resource practices it is important that they are aware of national and individual cultural differences towards standardization itself. Cultural differences affect reactions not only to the specific human practice but also to the standardization. Companies can use dimensions such as power distance and the survival/self‐expression dimension to understand the response of their employees. Being aware of this challenge may lead multinationals to pursue more fine‐tuned ways of communicating and implementing a standardized practice.

Using experiments to understand the implementation of practices in multinational organizations it is identified that, before deciding whether a practice should be locally adapted or standardized, the first step is to find out how standardization itself is perceived.

The topic of organisational culture is of significant interest in the management literature since culture is so closely tied to organisational identity and work processes. Culture is usually measured as a set of shared symbols, values, and artifacts across an organisation. However, few studies have attempted to determine if cultures are indeed truly shared. This study addresses this issue by examining cultural perceptions of employees to see whether their perceptions vary by demographic characteristics and/or across organisational units. The site of the study is one of the major companies in the long‐term health‐care industry. Using ten cultural dimensions, significant differences in perceptions were found by organisational unit, the age of the employee, the employee’s gender, and their ethnicity. Interestingly, a much more tenuous relationship between work experiences and cultural beliefs was found. Implications for practice as well as areas for future research are provided.

The purpose of this paper is to review and understand the underlying structure of price perception, to recognize how cultural factors influence price perception, and to develop and empirically test a model of cultural differences and price perception.

This project gathered data from both China and the USA. Using the LISREL 8.52 program, a proposed model was tested and modified in order to obtain a parsimonious underlying structure explaining cultural influences on consumers' price perceptions.

Results of the data analysis show that culture factors do have significant effects on price perception. Internal reference price has a consistent and negative effect on the overall price perception of both goods and services purchase and durable and non‐durable goods purchase. However, the significant associations between price perception factors and overall price perception were only found in the services and non‐durable goods purchase but not in the durable goods purchase.

This study helps international marketers understand the cross‐cultural consumer behavioral differences in general and the price perception differences in particular. It also provides a series of guidelines for international pricing strategy and international promotion strategy on an operational level.

Theoretically, the paper integrates the solid base of work on domestic pricing from the Lichtenstein et al. study on price perception as well as work on culture from anthropology and sociology, international business, international marketing, and Hofstede's culture theory.

Despite considerable conceptual interest in the relationship between organizational culture and various types of organizational change, empirical evidence regarding this relationship at different levels and types of change is surprisingly absent. This study examines whether organizational culture perceptions differ in frequently versus infrequently changing organizations, and whether this relationship is moderated by members' hierarchical level in the organization (i.e. staff, manager, executive).

Study includes culture survey data for 904 staff, managers and executives from one frequently changing and two infrequently changing organizations in the education sector.

Results show multiple non-monotonic organization-by-organizational level interaction effects on cultural style scores. In the frequently changing organization, executives report lower constructive cultural style scores and higher defensive cultural style scores than do managers and staff. In the infrequently changing organizations, executives, managers and staff report similar constructive and defensive style scores.

In frequently changing organizations, leaders are more likely to be discontent with the status quo and continuously encourage change efforts, while lower level members' have considerable experience with change and are empowered to continuously create change. The result is systematic differences in culture perceptions across levels, but also an agile organization capable of pursuing opportunities to improve organizational performance.

The authors’ findings show that systematic differences in perceptions of cultural styles across organizational levels relate to organizational change frequency. This contrasts with existing literature emphasizing the importance of culture perceptions being pervasive throughout the organization.

Drawing upon the theory of information culture from information science and prior research on Chinese information practices. The purpose of this paper is to posit that instead of over-relying on Hofstede’s national cultural values, the IS field should develop theories on national information culture to bridge the theoretical gaps found in explaining the differences in individuals’ IT perceptions and behaviors across cultures.

To achieve the objectives of this study, two quantitative studies were conducted. The first study is exploratory in nature and focuses on the development and calibration of an instrument to measure the Chinese information culture (CIC). The second study takes a confirmatory approach to investigate the impact of the CIC on IT perceptions of manager.

The study develops and validates an instrument for measuring the CIC that comprises information source and format preference, information ownership and analysis style, and centralized decision-making and information control. The CIC is found to influence IT perceptions of managers including perceived performance improvement resulted from IT use, attitude toward using work technologies and attitude on the value of IT in general.

This study is one of the first studies to theorize national information culture to understand IT perceptions at the individual level. The development of the CIC measure provides the much needed methodological support for contextualizing cross-cultural research.

This study aims to reveal the association between task conflict and job satisfaction with the mediating role of incivility and the moderating role of self-esteem. In addition, the data collected from the UK and Turkey were analyzed separately, and the aim was to contribute to the literature in this field by analyzing the research model in a cultural context.

This research focuses on the relationship between managers and subordinates in organizations. In this study, a survey method was applied to 708 subordinates, both UK and Turkish citizens, working in nine different industries. The obtained data were first analyzed in combination; then, the data of both countries were analyzed separately, and the effect of cultural differences on the research model was investigated.>

According to the results obtained, the relationship between task conflict and job satisfaction is negative, and subordinates’ perceptions of incivility play a mediating role in this relationship. In addition, subordinates’ self-esteem level has a moderating role in the effect of task conflict on job satisfaction through incivility. However, there is no evidence of an effect of culture on this model.

This study contributes to the literature by presenting new evidence on the antecedents of job satisfaction. In addition, it is one of the pioneering studies that provides evidence of the impact of the perceptions and personal characteristics of disputants in a task conflict on task conflict outcomes. Furthermore, this study contributes to the limited cross-cultural studies in the conflict and job satisfaction literature.

The purpose of this paper is to fill the gap in the literature by exploring the perceived societal discrimination as an antecedent of perceived organizational discrimination, and investigating the impact of organizational culture (i.e. constructive, passive-defensive and aggressive-defensive culture norms) on perceptions of discrimination in the workplace.

A total of 176 American employees completed three surveys assessing perceived societal discrimination, perceived organizational discrimination and organizational culture online through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Data were analyzed using hierarchical multiple regression method.

Results suggest individuals’ perceptions of discrimination in the workplace are influenced by both perceived discrimination in society and perceptions of behavioral norms related to organizational culture. Findings in the current study indicated individuals’ attitudes and beliefs manifested in the societal context were carried into, and reflected in, the workplace. Additionally, beliefs related to organizational discrimination were found to be amplified or minimized depending on organizational culture; specifically, organizations dominated by culture norms reflecting behaviors related to individual security needs predicted higher levels, and culture norms reflecting behaviors related to meeting employee satisfaction needs predicted lower levels of perceived organizational discrimination.

This paper tested theoretical frameworks debated in the literature by exploring beyond institutional boundaries in the study of perceived discrimination by exploring perceived societal discrimination as an antecedent to perceived organizational discrimination. This project also is the first study (to authors’ knowledge) to investigate the impact of organizational culture on perceived organizational discrimination.

Tourists’ destination image is crucial for visiting intentions. An ancient capital with diverse characteristics is an important component of China’s urban tourism. The purpose of this paper is to address the following questions: what are the differences and commonalities of the perceived destination image of ancient capitals? What makes the difference of the perceived destination image in these cities? Aside from the exterior factors, are there internal factors of cities that influence tourists’ cognition and perception of destination image?

The comment text data of Baidu tourism website were used to determine the differences in the destination images of China’s four great ancient capitals: Beijing, Xi’an, Nanjing and Luoyang. ROST content mining and semantic network analysis were for differences and commonalities of the perceived destination image, and correlation analysis was used to explore the internal factors of cities that influence tourists’ cognition and perception of destination image.

Though the same as ancient capital, the four ancient capitals’ images are far apart; historical interests are the core of tourism experience in ancient capital city; image perception is from physical carrier, history and culture, and human cognition; tourist’ destination affect of ancient capital is most from its history and culture; protecting identity and maintaining daily life are crucial for ancient city tourism.

Previous studies on ancient capitals have focused on the invariable identity of ancient capitals’ destination images, and left a gap on determining from where the invariable identity comes in general and how much it influences destination image. This gap was addressed in this study, by analyzing the destination images of four ancient capitals in China as cases. In this way, this study provided reference to the other ancient cities worldwide.

This study sets out to examine whether protégés have more favorable perceptions of an organization's culture for balancing work and family than non‐protégés.

Data were obtained from 418 employees of a major public accounting firm who completed a survey on mentoring and work‐family issues. Correlation analyses, t‐tests, and regressions were performed to test the hypotheses.

The results strongly support the view that protégés had more favorable perceptions than non‐protégés of the organization's work‐family culture – the degree to which integration of employees' work and family lives is supported. Having a mentor was significantly related to each component of work‐family culture (managerial support, time demands, and career consequences) in the predicted direction.

By focusing on respondents in a single firm, it is impossible to determine whether the findings generalize to individuals in other industries or companies.

To attract and retain employees, organizations have become increasingly concerned about their cultures for balancing work and family. By encouraging mentoring, organizations can transmit the message to their employees of resources and support available to help achieve balance.

Despite strong interest in the fields of mentoring and work‐family balance, few research studies have attempted to link these two domains. This research integrates these areas and demonstrates the important role mentors play in developing perceptions of an organization's culture for work‐family balance.