Relationships between organizational justice,organizational trust and organizational commitment: a cross-cultural study of China,South Korea and Australia

In an increasingly globalized world, organizations that operate in more than one country are a substantial part of the world economy. It is therefore beneficial to understand the attitudes of employees in different countries and their impact on the organization. One important area is organizational justice and its relationships with organizational trust (OT) and organizational commitment. This empirical study collected survey data from university employees across China, South Korea and Australia. We proposed that OT would mediate the relationships between affective organizational commitment (AOC) and both distributive justice (DJ) and procedural justice (PJ) in all three countries. In Australia, we found that PJ and AOC were significantly related, and OT fully mediated the PJ-AOC relationship. In China and South Korea, both DJ and PJ were significantly related to AOC, and OT fully mediated the PJ-AOC relationship. OT partially mediated the DJ-AOC relationship in China but fully mediated this relationship in South Korea. Implications for theory and for management practitioners are discussed, and areas for future investigation are identified.     

民族文化定势在跨文化交际中的影响

文化定势在跨文化交际中是一种普遍存在、不可避免的认知方式,它是直接影响交际效果和质量的重要因素之一.对文化定势有更加客观正确的认识,能够促进跨文化之间的交流,我们要合理运用文化定势,使文化定势成为反思自我、认知他人的一个有效的基础,要正确恰当地处理文化差异性所带来的问题,达到成功交际的目的.     

A Cross-cultural comparison of customer complaint behavior in restaurants in hotels

This study documented consumer complaint behavior in hotel restaurants in two diverse cosmopolitan cities, Hong Kong, SAR and Houston, USA. It was found that in the area of food and beverage attributes, the Hong Kong group rated tastiness, temperature and freshness less important to make a complaint about the Houston group. As for service, service efficiency, greetings, attentiveness and helpfulness were rated differently, with the Hong Kong group rated “greetings” higher than the Houston counterparts. Regarding atmospherics, the two groups were most alike, though the Hong Kong group would be more likely to complain about the noise level while the Houston group, temperature and décor of hotel restaurants.     

Toward a Fine Balance: Cross-Cultural Comparison of Work–Family Identities

This study investigates the differences in the salience of work and family identities between samples of employees in the United States and India. The authors hypothesized the effects of cultural differences on these workers' salient identities. Additionally, the authors hypothesized that across cultures a balance in the importance of family and work identities achieved by an individual would lead to greater job and life satisfaction and fewer intentions to turnover. Structural equation modeling tests support the authors' hypotheses. This article contributes toward an understanding of cross-cultural differences and even some similarities in work–family identity issues and the outcomes a balance in them engender.     

Multinational corporate website strategies and influencing factors: A comparison of US and Korean corporate websites

This study, using a content analysis method, explored whether and to what extent multinational corporate websites targeting different markets are standardized. It also tested three organizational factors – country of origin, company size, and product type – for their potential influence on the level of corporate website standardization. A sample of 52 top US-based multinational companies and 52 Korea-based multinational companies was drawn and a total of 104 pairs of websites for these companies were content-analyzed. Overall, the degree of website standardization was not significantly different between companies based in the two countries. The results suggest that both US and Korean multinational corporations tend to maintain their websites in a similar way when targeting the home and foreign markets. Among the three organizational factors, only product type – B2B versus B2C products and durables versus non-durables – was found to be significantly associated with the level of website standardization. This study makes important contributions to the research literature by offering new information on the current state of multinational corporate website strategies and advancing our knowledge about international marketing communications on the Internet and influencing factors.     

Munificence of Parent Corporate Contexts and Expatriate Cross-Cultural Training in China

The practice of providing expatriates with cross-cultural training varies widely among business corporations. To examine the proposition that some characteristics of the parent corporation context could be munificent to the practice of providing cross-cultural training, a mail survey was addressed to business expatriates in China. Surprisingly, the results showed no association between corporate size, international stake, and international experience on the one hand and the extent to which the expatriates had received cross-cultural training on the other hand. Although an ad hoc analysis found a positive relationship between international experience and the provision of sequential cross-cultural training, there was no association between any of the variables depicting corporate context and predeparture or postarrival training. The findings and their implications are discussed in detail.     

International Executives,Identity Strategies and Mobility in France and China

The strategies of multinational firms increasingly rely in Asia Pacific Region on processes of socialising their employees, who are seeking to develop and reinforce a “global” company culture, without endangering the cultures of local subsidiaries. Specialists have coined the term “cross-cultural management”. A role of “company ambassador” is allocated to a new generation of international executives in Asia whose mission will be to play an effective role as interface between head office its the subsidiaries – and between the subsidiaries themselves – once they have been suitably “impregnated” with the company culture and the particular features of different markets.

The repeated experience of international mobility that executives live through means that the individual may well be living in conflict with previous identities. It is true to say that nobody stays long in an internationally mobile situation without running the risk of there being strong divergence between the domestic and residential worlds, the life of the community and the world of the company. This article has been written as a result of in-depth research into the way executives of a large French oil company built up their identities and as a result of a study examines intercultural learning based on French expatriates' experience in China. We consider how French expatriates experience China and what imaginary underlies their perception. Analysis of daily socialization and interaction processes shows intercultural competence develops along distinct immersion stages: immersion–adjustment, immersion–comprehension, and immersion–integration. Individually, adjustment and comprehension support intercultural practice. The ultimate immersion stage leads to enlightened pragmatism stemming from “nomadic intelligence”. Where a researcher in the social sciences or a business man might have expected to have found an homogenous international elite, international executives building an “international system”, the heterogeneous nature of the identity strategies of international executives give the lie to the myth of the large company as a space for the irreversible assimilation of its members. At an individual level, being an international executive is a unique way of living the experience abroad, or rather, several different ways of experiencing identity strategies linked to the manipulation of one's ethnicity in a context of significant geographical and functional mobility.     

Exploring antecedents of attitudes and skepticism towards pharmaceutical advertising and inter-attitudinal and inter-skepticism consistency on three levels: an international study

Abstract

Given the increasing relevance of over-the-counter (OTC) drugs to individuals’ health and well-being, this study explores whether selected health variables, as well as consumers’ attitudes and skepticism towards advertising in general, influence their attitudes and skepticism towards pharmaceutical advertising. It extends previous research by building on the theory of inter-attitudinal consistency, examining how three different levels of attitudes and skepticism are interrelated. A field study was conducted on three continents (727 subjects; non-student sample). Results reveal that consumer attitudes and skepticism towards advertising in general, influence attitudes and skepticism towards pharmaceutical advertising in particular, which positively impact the attitudes and skepticism towards four different ad appeal types. The study extends the theory of inter-attitudinal consistency to inter-skepticism consistency. Results further indicate that attitudes and skepticism towards advertising in general can be considered as key antecedents, but that several additional health-related factors also influence consumers’ attitudes and skepticism towards pharmaceutical advertising. Moreover, attitudes and skepticism towards advertising in general, towards pharmaceutical advertising, as well as towards specific pharmaceutical ads, are negatively related. Reasons explaining these results are addressed, as are study limitations and implications for future research.     

Managing Opportunism in China: The Roles of Guanxi,Environmental Uncertainty,and Management Culture

ABSTRACT

This cross-cultural comparison aims to understand whether the influence of consumer ethnocentrism (CE) on consumer preference for domestic versus foreign products is product category and country-of-origin dependent. Three countries with dissimilar cultural orientation and economic status—China, South Korea, and the United States—were examined. American consumers were found to be more ethnocentric than Chinese and South Korean consumers. CE was found to significantly and positively predict American and Korean consumers’ preference for domestic products across product categories, while Chinese consumers’ CE did not translate into their preference for Chinese products. In addition, the relationship between CE and purchase preference varied across product categories as well as countries of origin.