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Cross-national studies of employees’ values and beliefs have extracted dimensions of national culture from diverse samples of employees. The purpose of this paper is to find out if this sample diversity impacts the nature of the extracted dimensions: is a given dimension replicable across diverse samples (such as managers vs skilled workers?).

The authors analyzed a set of values from the World Values Survey, comparing nation-level value structures from four types of samples in 46 countries: national representation, managers, experts without supervisory duties, and skilled workers. The authors analyzed the data with, and simultaneously compared, two data reduction methods: multidimensional scaling (MDS) plots (Shalom Schwartz’s preferred method) vs exploratory factor analysis (EFA).

MDS plots suggested structural similarity across the four samples, whereas EFA suggests divergence.

Whether dimensions of national culture replicate across different samples or not depends on the data reduction method. There is no one best method in an abstract sense. Researchers’ choice of method should be contingent on their research philosophy: theory-driven vs empirical.

No such study has been published previously.

Individualism‐collectivism and power distance are among the dimensions of national culture frequently discussed in the leadership literature and in executive development programmes. Examines cross‐cultural leadership implications of the likely interaction of collectivism and high power distance. Includes a call for more awareness of how collectivism and power distance may together influence workplace behaviour. Suggests that this awareness needs to be incorporated in cross‐cultural leadership training and research agendas.

Glass hurdles in business are cognitive reflections of the greater difficulty faced by women compared to men in achieving success as managers. The social glass hurdle is the distance between one’s gender stereotype and the ratings of a successful manager; the personal glass hurdle, the distance between one’s self‐assessment and the ratings of a successful manager. This research examined two important reflections of these glass hurdles in Hong Kong. Results showed that students of both genders regarded the successful middle manager as more similar to the typical male than to the typical female. The relative size of this social glass hurdle did not change across their two years of training for a career in business. A persisting personal glass hurdle was also found. Discusses these results in relation to those found in other social‐political contexts, and suggests that continuing challenges face women who aspire to managerial positions.

Confirms the empirical test of Hunt and Vitell’s general theory of marketing ethics by Mayo and Marks across four cultures. Uses path analysis to show the core relationships of the general theory of marketing ethics were successfully replicated using over 1,500 students from seven universities in the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, and Australia. States that tomorrow’s managers appeared to use a more deontological approach to making ethical judgements about personal selling. Extends its original research by confirming the positive relationship between the probability and the desirability of consequences. Concludes that, although the model was originally intended to explain management ethical decision making, the study shows that it may be possible to generalize as to how individuals make ethical life decisions.

Evaluates the classical theoretical framework of planning and its relevancy in an international context. Additionally, it integrates Hofstede’s model of cultural dimensions into the discussion to provide an exploratory analysis of how national culture characteristics may impact cross‐cultural acceptance and application of classical planning principles.

The link between social interaction and entrepreneurial activity has attracted considerable attention in the entrepreneurship literature. In this study, we focus on individual cultural values, shaped by interactions in the social space, as they relate to opportunity evaluation, a cornerstone of the entrepreneurial process. We test our predictions in India, a non-Western society that has sustained one of the highest rates of entrepreneurial activity in the world. Our findings suggest that value orientation of high power distance is negatively associated with opportunity evaluation whereas uncertainty avoidance, collectivism, and femininity are positively associated with opportunity evaluation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between culture and entrepreneurial activity at both the national and regional levels of analyses. While there has been significant progress in investigating the effects of culture on entrepreneurial activity, most work overlooks the effects that time-orientation may have on national or regional entrepreneurial activity. Specifically, this study argues for the connection between long-term orientation (LTO) and subsequent levels of entrepreneurship such that the more a nation or region is long-term oriented, the higher the subsequent entrepreneurial activity will be.

Data from the World Value Survey (WVS), which is a global project that measures individuals’ values across 62 countries (World Value Survey, 2011), were used for this project. The final sample consisted of 36,652 individual observations across 29 nations and 262 regions and was analyzed using ecological factor analyses and multilevel modeling.

The findings suggest that LTO as a cultural dimension does influence entrepreneurship activity levels. The findings also suggest that the effects of LTO at the regional and national levels vary widely. Specifically, the authors find LTO to be positively related to entrepreneurship at the regional, but not national, level of analysis.

The findings reveal important nuances about the implications that the understudied cultural factor of LTO has on entrepreneurial activity across multiple levels of analysis.

This article aims to introduce the theoretical underpinnings of a project that contributes to the empirical field research study literature concerning societal cultural and individual value priority effects on explicit preferred leader behaviour of employed businesspeople, and in some cases business students. The article then reviews research studies and results related to the theories and operationalisations.

This particular article is an introduction to the history and systems of the Leader Behaviour Description Questionnaire XII (LBDQXII) instrument to assess preferred leader behaviour priorities, followed by a review of empirical studies employing the instrument.

The findings indicate that the LBDQXII is adequate for the task at hand, and that societal cultural differences moderate variability in preferences for leader behaviour associated with leadership effectiveness. The reputation of the LBDQXII has been damaged by researchers, editors, reviewers, and dissertation and thesis supervisors’ lack of knowledge or disregard of available knowledge concerning the development of the instrument, its use, and proper methods and methodology. The results in the project studies indicate that similarities such as the same local language coupled with geographic proximity lead to similar kinds of preferred leader behaviour priorities between countries and within countries having diverse sub‐cultures, such as China. Although the samples were all employed businesspeople, sample differences can have significant effects, such as influence stemming industry membership. A conclusion is that, carefully applied and analysed, the LBDQXII is a useful, reliable, and valid survey instrument that can be employed to prepare, educate, and develop expatriates and local managers as to what behaviours are expected in business organisations in different cultures.

The reliabilities of some scales in the LBDQXII are low for some dimension scales for some countries. An objective of the research project is to produce a shorter, more reliable survey for use across cultures. Studies in the project indicate an influence on factor structure apparently due to the overarching analytic cognition or holistic cognition nature of a society.

The practical implications of the project are to identify and measure preferred leader behaviour dimensions that are similar and different across national and sub‐national cultures. Such information can be used to develop global leaders and to educate and train managerial leaders for success in multiple countries. A conclusion is that the LBDQXII can be employed to prepare, educate, and develop expatriates and local managers for international assignments.

Explicit theories of leadership (ELTs) and implicit theories of leadership (ILTs) have received varying amounts of attention in leadership research. Reading the leadership literature, the author finds little consideration of ELTs (explicit theories of leadership), most study and report on implicit traits, or a mixture of implicit and explicit. A major contribution of this research project and this special issue of the journal is the development of testing and support of an explicit theory of leadership and presenting progress in its operationalisation, and it evaluates a widely used survey instrument across cultures.

This paper aims to analyze the effectiveness of cultural profiling tools in predicting and identifying potential cultural pitfalls and challenges that the executive could encounter during an interaction with an individual or group from a different national culture. The initial analysis is based on the author’s experience in China. Over a two-year period and as part of the wider strategy to implement account management principles within the local sales teams across China, the strategy and sales development team (composed of two Chinese nationals lead by a Spanish/USA experienced expatriate/author) engaged senior members of the sales team through a series of workshops.

Despite the top management support and the alignment of the program with the organizational culture of the company, the coaching program had limited success. Using a past experience in China and as part of a preliminary study on cultural profiling models available to executives, professors and students exposed to global environments, the author reviewed three popular cultural models to potentially identify sources of conflict, cultural gaps and misalignments between individual culture and the national cultures.

The paper found that culture profiling tools could have a guiding value for executives and other individuals visiting a different culture, as it identified potential sources of conflict and pitfalls to avoid.

The paper offered a fresh look at proliferating culture profiling tools.

This study investigates the role of national culture between outreach and sustainability of microfinance institutions (MFIs). Despite microfinance's deep embeddedness in cultural contexts, research on the influence of national culture on MFI performance is rather sparse. This paper seeks to fill this gap and, based on cross-country microfinance data, attempts to explain the outreach-sustainability relationship in reference to cultural factors.

An unbalanced panel, consisting of 5,741 MFI-year observations of 1,232 MFIs from 43 countries in six regions, is drawn from the Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX) Market database. Two different econometric models are tested. Model 1 estimates the direct effect of outreach on sustainability, using a fixed-effects estimator. Model 2 examines the moderation effect of national culture on outreach-sustainability relationship, employing correlated random effects approach.

The results show that depth of outreach and financial sustainability of MFIs are negatively related, and the relationship is moderated by national culture. Power distance and uncertainty avoidance positively moderate the outreach-sustainability relationship, whereas individualism and masculinity negatively moderate the relationship.

The findings suggest that the national culture where MFIs are located plays an important contingent role in their performance and that the magnitude of the trade-off effect varies from culture to culture. The research thus provides further insight in the trade-off debate and contributes to literatures of both microfinance and cross-cultural management.