Attitudes toward Corporate Responsibilities in Western Europe and in Central And East Europe

This study investigated the attitudes toward social, economic, and environmental corporate responsibilities of 3064 current managers and business students in 8 European countries. Participants in Western European countries had significantly different perspectives on the importance of these corporate responsibilities (CR) than those in Central and East European countries. Within each country, environmental CR is perceived as most important in both CEE and Western European countries. Across countries, Western European respondents accord more importance to social CR and less importance to economic CR. CEE countries are not homogenous, e.g., CR attitudes in the Czech Republic are closer to that of Western Europeans, possibly triggered by the accession to EU. Work experience (managers vs. business students) influences social and environmental orientations more than the economic orientation for only some countries. Generational differences were found as well: Business students attribute more importance to environmental CR and less importance to social CR than managers

A Twenty-First Century Assessment of Values Across the Global

This article provides current Schwartz Values Survey (SVS) data from samples of business managers and professionals across 50 societies that are culturally and socioeconomically diverse. We report the society scores for SVS values dimensions for both individual- and societallevel analyses. At the individual-level, we report on the ten circumplex values sub-dimensions and two sets of values dimensions (collectivism and individualism; openness to change, conservation, self-enhancement, and self- transcendence). At the societal-level, we report on the values dimensions of embeddedness, hierarchy, mastery, affective autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and harmony. For each society, we report the Cronbach’s a statistics for each values dimension scale to assess their internal consistency (reliability) as well as report interrater agreement (IRA) analyses to assess the acceptability of using aggregated individual level values scores to represent country values. We also examined whether societal development level is related to systematic variation in the measurement and importance of values. Thus, the contributions of our evaluation of the SVS values dimensions are two-fold. First, we identify the SVS dimensions that have cross-culturally internally reliable structures and withinsociety agreement for business professionals. Second, we report the society cultural values scores developed from the twenty-first century data that can be used as macro-level predictors in multilevel and single-level international business research

Ethical preferences for influencing superiors: A 41-society study

With a 41-society sample of 9990 managers and professionals, we used hierarchical linear modeling to investigate the impact of both macro-level and micro-level predictors on subordinate influence ethics. While we found that both macro-level and micro-level predictors contributed to the model definition, we also found global agreement for a subordinate influence ethics hierarchy. Thus our findings provide evidence that developing a global model of subordinate ethics is possible, and should be based upon multiple criteria and multilevel variables

Societal-level versus individual-level predictions of ethical behavior: a 48-society study of collectivism and individualism

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed

Corporate governance and firm performance in Russia: an empirical study

Using the agency and institutional perspectives, this study advances several hypotheses about the board structure-firm performance relationship within Russia. We tested these hypotheses using survey data. Despite a relatively small sample size, predictions from both theoretical perspectives were supported. Specifically, we found a negative relationship between "informal" CEO duality and firm performance. This finding is noteworthy given the 1996 Russian Federal law which prohibits the CEO from also serving as board chair. Also, we found that the more vigorously the firm pursues a retrenchment strategy, the more negative the relationship between proportion of inside directors and firm performance. Overall, these findings suggest that effective corporate governance may be essential to firm performance in Russia.Russia Firm performance CEO duality Board composition Retrenchment

The triple-bottom-line of corporate responsibility: Assessing the attitudes of present and future business professionals across the BRICs

Research on corporate responsibility (CR), a topic that has grown in importance over the past few decades, has focused primarily on developed countries. In this study, we look to the future and direct our attention to the values/attitudes of business professionals in two high-growth economies of the Asia Pacific; namely, China and India. These two countries, coupled with Brazil and Russia, make up the BRIC countries, which together and individually are increasingly becoming integral members of the global economic powerbase. Our attention in this paper is upon the triple-bottom-line-economic, social, and environmental-of CR. Using crossvergence theory as our theoretical foundation, we investigate the influence of specific macro-level socio-cultural and business ideology factors upon the triple-bottom-line of CR across the BRICs. We also investigated the meso-level trending similarities/differences in CR attitudes within and across these countries for both present generation and future generation business professionals. At the macro-level, we found that socio-cultural values were the best predictor of CR attitudes. At the generational level, we found that the future generation in these developing/transitioning countries placed more importance on economic CR than on social or environmental CR. In sum, the BRIC countries provide potentially fruitful contexts for future research, for which this study lays a foundation

A Cross-Cultural Examination of Person-Organization Fit: Is P-O Fit Congruent with or Contingent

Many single-country studies have examined compatibility between the individual values of the employee and organizational cultural values, typically referred to as person-organization (P-O) fit. However, little progress has been made in understanding whether P-O fit relationships generalize across countries and, if so, whether and how societal values impact this relationship. Because of this void, it is important to extend the P-O fit literature cross-culturally to explain not only how individual values relate to organizational values but also how societal values influence P-O fit relationships. Our study of 1,307 business professionals across six diverse countries focused on individualism/collectivism values at societal, organizational, and individual levels. We found that individual values are consistently congruent with organizational cultural values in individualistic societies, but found mixed results for P-O values fit in collectivistic societies. Our results provide more support for the contingency perspective (rather than the nested theory of culture) on how societal values influence P-O values fit relationships. Implications for the cross-cultural generalizability of extant P-O fit theory as well as for organizations are discussed

A multi-country, multi-sector replication challenge to the validity of the cultural tightness-looseness measure

In this study, we assess the internal and external validity of Gelfand et al.'s (2011) recently developed measure of cultural tightness-looseness (CTL). Our study is composed of six countries (China, Mexico, Netherlands Russia, Spain, U.S.) with three subsamples (business professionals, K-12 teachers, college students) per country. For these 18 subsamples, confirmatory factor analyses failed to support the unidimensional structure of the 6-item CTL measure. Exploratory factor analyses provided further evidence that the 6-item CTL measure does not have a unidimensional structure across cultures. Additionally, inter-rater agreement analyses did not support the use of aggregated scores to construct country-level scores for the CTL index. We also found that country rankings of CTL scores (in total and for subsamples) were substantively different from those reported by Gelfand et al. (2011). Further country-level correlation analyses yielded mixed support for the external validity of the CTL scores. We conclude with a commentary on the implications of our study for cross-cultural research