The impact of cross -cultural differences on feedback seeking behavior: Tendency to engage, strategy type, and preferred source choice

Abstract

Cross-cultural scholars continually request empirical research that broadens the complexity of culture. In response to the call for more meso-level research, the aim of this research project was to develop societal and organizational measures of culture to compare with attributes of feedback-seeking behavior suitable to use across cultures. Integrating long standing theoretical as well as recent concepts of culture, this study identifies two cultural syndromes, Tolerance for Ambiguity and Status Identity, with the objective of developing conceptually and methodologically sound measures of these constructs. A major methodological contribution centers on the cross-cultural scales created for this study. Exploratory and confirmatory analysis offered a condensed, focused and organizationally relevant set of survey questions. From this analysis, multi-dimensionality of these two cultural syndromes emerged. By examining culture along these multi-dimensional syndromes, it was my intention to measure the differences in the tendency to engage, strategy type and preferred source choice in feedback-seeking behavior between the two countries of the United States and Peru. These multi-dimensional sub-scales were found to differ within the countries of research interest, thus it was necessary to assess feedback-seeking behavior across both country and culture sub-dimensions. Put simply, countries did not measure consistently high or low on either cultural syndrome, suggesting complexity in the influence of each sub-dimension with feedback-seeking behavior. Regarding tendency to engage, this study showed the US respondents had a higher tendency than Peru respondents to engage in seeking feedback. The general country comparisons conducted for strategy preference and source choice provided insightful into the proclivity of a country for feedback seeking. However, as the underlying culturally specific sub-dimensions were further delineated, a more refined explanation surfaced. The results suggest these cultural sub-dimensions contributed differentially to influence feedback-seeking behavior in the organization; therefore great care must be taken in making overarching generalization about culture

    Similar works

    Full text

    thumbnail-image