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As Chinese companies move to the world stage of business, they must leverage a more knowledgeable and collaborative workforce to meet new challenges. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how two prominent individual attributes, education, and allocentrism, create work tension for human capital practices in Chinese companies.

Surveying nearly 500 workers in four Chinese companies and using multi-level methodology.

The authors found that higher levels of education work to the detriment of employees’ affective organizational commitment (AOC) and positively influence seeking-to-leave behavior. In addition, this study suggests a positive relation between allocentrism and AOC. Personalized leadership, a common leadership style in high-power distance cultures such as China, further exacerbates the problems with higher levels of education and diminishes the commitment benefits of allocentrism. Conversely, regardless of leadership style, if supervisors involve workers in decision-making activities, those workers who are more educated will become more committed to the organization and less likely to leave.

The data were collected using self-reported questionnaires, which may cause common method variance. The reliability for personalized leadership was slightly below 0.70. This may be due to the multiple dimensions that are reflected in leadership styles. Another limitation of this study is its focus on allocentrism without considering other personal expression of cultural values. This approach could be too narrow (Gelfand et al., 2007).

This study suggests that members who endorse allocentrism might be more likely to have high-affective commitment. If managers can select individuals high on the allocentrism scale, there is a higher likelihood these individuals will attach emotionally to the organization. Managers should not simply conclude that idiocentrics are “worse” employees than allocentrics. Instead, managers may utilize effective management tactics to cultivate more socialized leadership visions among their supervisors. Finally, the authors find that independent of whether leadership is more or less personalized, managers can retain valued educated workers by including them in decision-making activities.

The authors have found that education may serve as a double edged sword for employers. As hypothesized, the findings suggested that employees’ level of education negatively relates to their affective commitment for their organizations. This study also contributes to the knowledge on the role of culture at the individual level (i.e. allocentrism) and how it affects employees’ attitudes and behavior. The authors found that workers who more highly value the group that they function within (allocentrics) tend to be more affectively committed to their organization.

It is one of the first studies to examine educational level and cultural orientation as antecedents to affective commitment, especially in Chinese businesses where workers’ education level is a growing phenomenon and allocentrism is a traditional characteristic of Chinese workers. Also, understanding the dynamics of group-individual linkages is generally most helpful to understanding organizational phenomenon (House et al., 1995). This meso framework is a hallmark feature of the study, given the hierarchical nature of the research inquiry and data set.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the moderating influence of idiocentrism and allocentrism on person-organization fit, person-job fit and work attitudes relationship.

The survey data were collected from 426 employees of a holding company.

The results reveal that allocentrism makes a difference in fitting the particular aspect of work environment for the individual. Results showed that allocentrism positively moderates person-organization fit and job satisfaction and organizational commitment and turnover relationship. However, no moderating influence of idiocentrism was found on person-organization fit and employee attitude relationship. Furthermore, it was also found that neither idiocentrism nor allocentrism moderated the relationship between the person-job fit and employee attitudes relationship.

This research adds a cultural component to the person-environment fit research.

This article aims to explore how self‐efficacy is related to academic research activities and how intra‐culturally relevant factors may play a role in self‐efficacy in the context of higher education in Beijing. In particular, relationships of self‐efficacy for research with research productivity and idiocentrism‐allocentrism are to be examined.

A survey was administered to academics in ten randomly selected universities in Beijing and generated 296 valid questionnaires. Data were analysed using factor analysis and multiple regression.

Gender and discipline are identified as predictors of self‐efficacy. Specifically, female academics reported lower levels of self‐efficacy for research than males. Academics in the social sciences reported lower levels of self‐efficacy for research than those in the natural sciences. Moreover, relationships are also found between self‐efficacy for research and idiocentrism‐allocentrism.

The study makes an extensive investigation of self‐efficacy theory, originally developed in Western contexts, in an Eastern culture and provides evidence that intra‐cultural and demographic factors play substantial roles in research self‐efficacy.

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.

One of the most well-known, seminal models in the tourism marketing field is the one proposed more than 40 years ago by Stanley Plog. His venturesomeness model has been widely cited in journal articles, textbooks, and has also been used as a reference for planning and designing tourism marketing projects. However, empirical research on Plog’s psychographic model has yielded varied, inconclusive results, and the postulates of his conceptual framework are still subject to academic scrutiny. While some empirical investigations have corroborated the model, others have found partial or no support for it. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to offer an exhaustive review of 26 studies in the literature which have employed Plog´s venturesomeness concept to examine travellers’ personality traits, attitudes, and behaviour, as a way to synthetise empirical findings and draw conclusions from the cumulative results. A discussion of the model’s contribution to the current body of knowledge and managerial implications for tourism marketing practitioners are presented.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of cultural intelligence (CQ), idiocentrism-allocentrism and organizational culture on work engagement in a multinational organization from the perspective of conservation of resources theory.

The sample consisted of 219 employees of a multinational company (MNC). Partial least squares–structural equation modeling was used to test the research model.

The results suggest that CQ is positively related to work engagement and that this relationship is moderated by employees’ idiocentrism-allocentrism, as well as by the adaptability dimension of organizational culture.

Greater generalizability of the findings could be achieved with a more geographically dispersed sample. Other cultural dimensions, as well as personal and organizational characteristics, should be considered in order to more clearly ascertain the relationships between these variables.

The findings suggest that CQ is a powerful tool for developing employee engagement within MNCs. Furthermore, a highly adaptive organizational culture and consideration of employees’ cultural values are important in order to enhance the effect of CQ on engagement.

This study identifies relevant resources that can aid in managing a diverse workforce and increasing employee engagement in companies that operate across national borders.

One of the most well-known, seminal models in the tourism field is the one proposed 50 years ago by Stanley C. Plog. His venturesomeness model has been widely cited in journal articles, textbooks, and has also been used as a reference for planning and designing tourism marketing projects. However, empirical research using Plog's psychographics has yielded varied results, some of which have corroborated his model, while others have found partial or no support for some postulates. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to offer an exhaustive review of 47 studies in the literature which have employed Plog's venturesomeness concept to examine travelers' personality traits, attitudes, and behavior, synthetizing empirical findings and drawing conclusions from the cumulative results. A discussion of the model's contribution to the current body of knowledge, managerial implications for tourism practitioners, and directions for future research are presented.

This study aims to apply McCornack’s (1992) information manipulation theory to the context of fraud and investigates the effects of culture on perceived deceptiveness.

In total, 400 Chinese consumers and an equal-size sample of Canadian consumers were recruited to fill an online survey. The survey integrates four scenarios of insurance fraud and measures of perceived deceptiveness, cultural tightness and horizontal-vertical idiocentrism allocentrism, in addition to some control variables.

Results show that at the societal level of culture, perceived deceptiveness is higher in individualistic than in collectivistic cultures. When accounting for the level of situational constraint, cultural tightness was found to magnify the perceived deceptiveness. At the individual level of culture, vertical-allocentrism and vertical-idiocentrism were found to weigh against the perception of deceptiveness.

Understanding cultural differences in perceived deceptiveness is helpful to spot sources of consumers’ vulnerability to fraud tolerance among a culturally diverse public.

The purpose of this paper is to review the relevant literature on travel motivation and provides a scenario‐based discussion on the applications of travel motivation theories in the industry practice. The paper offers an invaluable practical interpretation of travel motivation and related management issues.

A comprehensive literature review on travel motivation is conducted to acknowledge the major theories. Two scenarios are presented and discussed by linking two motivation conceptual schemes, Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory and Plog's allocentrism/psychocentrism model, to practical issues in travel management.

The literature review discloses that travel motivation theories have evolved over time. By linking theories to industry practice, the paper advocates that travel managers be more conscious of travelers' internal psychological needs when designing travel services/products.

This paper offers a good understanding of travel motivation by discussing theoretical applications in real‐world situations.

Given the increasing global focus of many aspects of our society, researchers have taken significant steps in understanding the impact of culture on various psychological states. This review focuses on the stressor–strain relationships within the context of cross-cultural and cross-national studies. Using research findings from the United States as a baseline, we identify common and unique themes concerning the stressor–strain relationships between different countries, and clarify the differences between cross-national and cross-cultural studies. Furthermore, we consider cross-cultural and cross-national occupational stress research from an individual differences perspective. We encourage future studies to adopt this perspective and carefully consider the implications of cultural values on occupational stress research at the individual, group, and country levels.