Are virtues national, supranational, or universal?

Many studies investigated cultural differences in values, most notably by Hofstede and Schwarz. Relatively few have focused on virtues, a related and important concept in contemporary social science. The present paper examines the similarities and differences between nations, or blocks of - culturally related - nations on the perceived importance of virtues. Adults (N = 2.809 students) from 14 countries were asked to freely mention which virtues they found important to practice in daily life, and next to rate a list of 15 virtues, which reflect the most frequently mentioned categories in The Netherlands, as found in a previous study. The 14 nations included the United States, Mexico, nine European and three Asian nations. For the free-listed virtues, we compared the top-ten lists of most frequently mentioned virtues across the nations. We used a correspondence analysis on the frequency table to assess the relationships between the virtues and nations. For the 15 virtues ratings, a MANOVA, and follow-up ANOVA’s were used to examine effects of nation, age, gender and religion. We found strong evidence for relationships between nations and blocks of culturally related nations and the importance attached to various virtues. There appear to be some country specific virtues, such as generosity in France, but also some relatively universal virtues, most notably honesty, respect, and kindness

Performance-based vs socially supportive culture:a cross-national study of descriptive norms and entrepreneurship

This paper is a cross-national study testing a framework relating cultural descriptive norms to entrepreneurship in a sample of 40 nations. Based on data from the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness project, we identify two higher-order dimensions of culture – socially supportive culture (SSC) and performance-based culture (PBC) – and relate them to entrepreneurship rates and associated supply-side and demand-side variables available from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Findings provide strong support for a social capital/SSC and supply-side variable explanation of entrepreneurship rate. PBC predicts demand-side variables, such as opportunity existence and the quality of formal institutions to support entrepreneurship

The effects of contingent feedback on perceived control and performance

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact on students' performance of three contingent feedback strategies used by teachers. Contingency means that the feedback strongly corresponds with task behaviour that can be controlled by the students. Elementary school students (N=296) received individualized feedback about their performance during a series of five lessons. Within this contingent feedback structure, three strategies were applied which were assumed to enhance the perceived controllability of the task situation: (1) enhancing the perceptibility of the contingency between feedback and task behavior; (2) explicit reference to effort as part of the feedback, and (3) setting of goals. As predicted, the three contingent feedback strategies had a significant positive effect on perceived controllability, and led to better task performance