Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

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Individualism, Masculinity, and the Sources of Organizational Commitment

Garry A. Gelade, Paul Dobson and Katharina Auer Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 2008 39: 599 DOI: 10.1177/0022022108321308 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jcc.sagepub.com/content/39/5/599

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Individualism, Masculinity, and the Sources of Organizational Commitment

Garry A. Gelade Paul Dobson
Cass Business School, City University, London

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology Volume 39 Number 5 September 2008 599-617 2008 Sage Publications 10.1177/0022022108321308 http://jccp.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

Katharina Auer
Shell International BV

The authors examine the dependence of organizational commitment on satisfaction with job characteristics that are valued differently in 29 nations. Evidence is found for the moderating effects of national culture. Satisfaction with job characteristics that are highly valued in individualistic cultures has an increasingly strong effect on commitment as national individualism increases, while satisfaction with collectivist job characteristics has an increasingly weaker effect. Similarly, satisfaction with job characteristics that are highly valued in masculine cultures has an increasingly strong effect on commitment as national masculinity increases, while satisfaction with feminine job characteristics has an increasingly weaker effect. These findings show that the sources of organizational commitment are culturally conditioned and that their effects are predictable from Hofstedes value dimensions. The authors discuss the practical implications of these findings and suggest that cultural differences in the psychological contract may also affect the relationships between job satisfaction and commitment. Keywords: individualism; masculinity; cultural values; organizational commitment

ince the publication of Cultures Consequences in 1980, Hofstedes model of national culture has exerted a widespread influence on cross-cultural and social psychology. In Hofstedes (1980) original model, culture was explained in terms of four dimensions, called, respectively, power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity. Hofstedes seminal contribution was to use empirical methods to position 50 major nations and three cultural regions on these dimensions and to relate this map of the worlds psychology to a vast body of previous research, theory, and national statistics. Hofstedes dimensions have been invoked by numerous scholars to account for observed differences in behaviors between people from different cultures and countries, and he is one of the most

Authors Note: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Garry Gelade, Cass Business School, City University, 106 Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8TZ, UK; e-mail: g.gelade@city.ac.uk.

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frequently cited social scientists of all time (Hofstede, 1997). However, many of the implications of Hofstedes findings still remain to be confirmed empirically, and in this article, we examine the relationship between Hofstedes dimensions and the sources of organizational commitment in different nations. It seems reasonable to suppose that the effectiveness of organizational practices will depend on the extent to which they address the high-value priorities of the workforce and, therefore, that to maximize and sustain the organizational commitment of a culturally diverse workforce, practices should be aligned to the local culture. This has clear relevance to multinational enterprises. As firms disperse their assets and operations across the globe (Bartlett & Ghoshal, 2000), their competitiveness becomes increasingly dependent on their ability to motivate a diverse labor force (Reade, 2001), and the development of organizational commitment in a multinational context thus becomes an increasingly important strategic imperative. Most research on organizational behavior has been carried out in Western countries (Gelfand, Erez, & Aycan, 2007). Previous researchers (Andolek & tebe, 2004; Buchko, Weinzimmer, & Sergeyev, 1998; Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, & Topolnytsky, 2002; Palich, Hom, & Griffeth, 1995) have found that the sources of commitment vary between nations; however, none has found a systematic relationship with cultural values. Organizations wishing to maximize commitment in nations other than the United States therefore have only scattered empirical evidence to guide them, and an understanding of the extent to which the development of commitment depends on cultural values would be of value in designing management systems that prioritize the key sources of commitment in different cultures. The aim of this article is thus to examine cross-cultural variation in the antecedents of organizational commitment (specifically various job characteristics) and to test whether Hofstedes cultural values can explain this variation. The rest of the article is organized as follows. We first review cross-cultural research on organizational commitment, focusing on studies that have examined its attitudinal antecedents. Next, we introduce the values-asmoderators framework as the theoretical underpinning for our research hypotheses and then describe how we derive our specific hypotheses from the structure of Hofstedes individualism and masculinity dimensions. We then describe the method and results and discuss their practical implications.

Organizational Commitment in a Cross-Cultural Perspective

Organizational commitment is a key construct in organizational psychology and has been defined as a psychological link between an employee and his or her organization that makes it less likely that the employee will voluntarily leave the organization (Allen & Meyer, 1996, p. 252). Commitment is widely thought to consist of three components: affective, continuance, and normative commitment. According to Allen and Meyer (1990), affective commitment develops through work experiences that fulfil employees needs to feel comfortable within the organization and competent in the work role (p. 4). Continuance commitment, on the other hand, is largely based on the investment that an employee has made in the organization (e.g., pension contributions) and the perceived lack of alternative employment opportunities, while normative commitment is based more on early experiences of socialization than on experiences in the employing organization (Allen & Meyer, 1996).

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This suggests that although affective commitment should covary with job satisfaction, there is little reason to expect continuance and normative commitment to do so. Substantial evidence (from research conducted in Western countries) supports this view. First, affective commitment has been shown to covary with many facets of work satisfaction (Mathieu & Zajac, 1990; Meyer et al., 2002; Steers, 1977). Second, in nine studies summarized by Allen and Meyer (1996), although the correlation of job satisfaction with affective commitment was positive and significant in every study, correlations with normative commitment were consistently lower, and significant in only four studies, and correlations with normative commitment were small and negative. The cross-cultural construct invariance of organizational commitment is fairly well established. Some (e.g., Ko, Price, & Mueller, 1997) have questioned the factor validity of commitment measures in East Asian samples. However, studies replicating previous U.S. research have been conducted on employees from the United Arabs Emirates (Yousef, 2003), Kenya (Walumbwa, Orwa, Wang, & Lawler, 2005), Belgium (Vandenberghe, 1996), Japan (White, Parks, Gallagher, Tetrault, & Wakabayashi, 1995), and China (Cheng & Stockdale, 2003). In the two most extensive studies to date, Palich et al. (1995) and Vandenberghe, Stinglhamber, Bentein, and Delhaise (2001) found support for measurement equivalence across a variety of Western countries. While organizational commitment levels vary significantly between countries, there is no evidence for a systematic effect of cultural values on the national means. Hofstedes dimensions either fail to correlate significantly with national means at all or fail to predict them in a theoretically meaningful way (Gelade, Dobson, & Gilbert, 2006; Randall, 1993; Vandenberghe et al., 2001). The evidence for national differences in the sources of commitment is rather sparse. Buchko et al. (1998) found that job involvement and promotion were stronger predictors of commitment for Russian workers than is typically found for American workers, although there were no differences for pay satisfaction, supervisor satisfaction, work satisfaction, or coworker satisfaction. In a seven-nation study, Andolek and tebe (2004) found that material job values such as job quality were more predictive of commitment in individualistic societies, whereas postmaterialistic job values such as helping others were more predictive of commitment in collectivistic societies. On the other hand, Palich et al. (1995) failed to detect any meaningful effect of cultural values on the relationship between commitment and job scope, role clarity, extrinsic rewards, and participative management across 15 nations. Furthermore, the relationship between commitment and intention to quit, a wellestablished consequence of commitment, also appears to show no cultural moderation (Vandenberghe et al., 2001). Finally, the meta-analysis of Meyer et al. (2002) found that role conflict and role ambiguity were stronger predictors of commitment within the United States than outside it; their data did not, however, permit them to test whether cultural values moderated these relationships. Considered overall, previous research has failed to provide convincing evidence for a systematic effect of cultural values on the sources of organizational commitment; such evidence as exists points to the absence of any effect. This is somewhat surprising, as it would be expected that in any particular culture, commitment should be most influenced by the job characteristics that are most highly valued. We explain this in further detail in the next section.

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Theoretical Foundations: The Values as Moderators Framework

The value theory of Schwartz and Bilsky (1987) holds that a persons value system is a structured domain whose elements are prioritized relative to one another; thus, a persons values can be ordered in terms of their importance. According to the values-as-moderators framework (Oishi, Diener, Suh, & Lucas, 1999), attaining goals or satisfying needs deemed important has a greater effect than attaining goals or satisfying needs deemed less important. Thus, for example, Malka and Chatman (2003) found that the effect of income on a persons subjective well-being (SWB) depends on the value he or she attaches to extrinsic rewards; thus, income and SWB are more strongly related for extrinsically oriented than intrinsically oriented persons. Similarly, Oishi, Diener, Suh et al. (1999) found changes in SWB to be strongly influenced by the degree of success in the domains that individuals value most, and Harris, Daniels, and Briner (2003) found that the achievement of high-importance goals at work increased pleasurable affect more than the achievement of low-importance goals. Similar reasoning can be applied at the cultural level. Personal feelings are deemed more important in individualistic cultures than in collectivist ones, and accordingly, Suh, Diener, Oishi, and Triandis (1998) found that affect balance was a stronger predictor of life satisfaction in individualistic cultures than in collectivist ones. Similarly Oishi, Diener, Lucas, and Suh (1999) found that satisfaction with esteem needs, such as freedom, predicts global life satisfaction more strongly among people in individualist nations than people in collectivist nations. The values-as-moderators framework also underlies prior theorizing on the crosscultural sources of commitment. For example, Palich et al. (1995) hypothesized that individual rewards should have a stronger influence on commitment in individualistic societies than in collectivist societies, because members of individualistic societies value individual rewards highly and regard them as indicators of success. Similarly, they suggested that job scope should foster commitment in individualist societies because complex work offers an opportunity for personal achievement, a highly valued aspiration in individualist societies. Generalizing, we may suppose that any aspect of the work environment that is highly valued in a culture will have a strong and positive effect on commitment and that in a culture where that aspect is less valued, its effect on commitment will be correspondingly weaker.

Individualism, Masculinity, and Research Hypotheses

We focus on individualism and masculinity in this article because Hofstede derived these dimensions entirely from employee ratings of the importance of various job characteristics. For example, employees were asked, How important is it to you to have . . . sufficient time for your personal or family life? or How important is it for you to have training opportunities . . . ? and responded by rating on a scale of 1 (of utmost importance to me) to 5 (of very little or no importance). As described later, knowing how job characteristics are valued in different cultures is key to our hypothesis generation; thus, Hofstedes power distance and uncertainty avoidance dimensions, which are measured by opinion scores, are unsuitable for the analyses we wish to conduct.

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In individualistic societies, individuals are independent of one another. According to Hofstede (2001), in individualistic societies, the ties between individuals are loose (p. 225) and everyone is expected to fend for themselves and their immediate families. In collectivist societies, group identity and cohesion are valued; here, people are integrated into strong cohesive in-groups which . . . protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty (p. 225). Masculinity measures the degree to which social gender roles are differentiated. According to Hofstede (2001), in masculine societies, social gender roles are clearly distinct: Men are supposed to be assertive, tough, and focussed on material success; women are supposed to be more modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life (p. 297); conversely, in feminine societies, social gender roles overlap. Both men and women are supposed to be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life (p. 297). In Hofstedes derivation of his individualism and masculinity dimensions, 14 job characteristics were rated for importance in 40 different countries. Ecological factor analysis of the importance ratings (i.e., at national level) recovered two interpretable, bipolar factors; these formed the basis for defining the two dimensions of individualism/collectivism and masculinity/femininity and for calculating the country scores for individualism and masculinity (denoted here as IDV and MAS, respectively). Hofstede called nations scoring high on his first factor individualistic and those scoring low collectivist; similarly, nations scoring high on his second factor were called masculine, and those scoring low were called feminine. The importance of a job characteristic in a particular nation is indicated by its factor loading. Thus, for example, the importance of having sufficient personal and family time loads positively on the Individualism/Collectivism factor. This means that employees in individualist (high IDV) nations say they value personal time more than do employees in collectivist (low IDV) nations. Conversely, the importance of training opportunities loads negatively on the Individualism/Collectivism factor. This means that employees in high IDV nations say they value training opportunities less than do employees in low IDV nations. Drawing on the values-as-moderators framework, we may therefore state our research hypotheses as follows:
Hypothesis 1: Satisfaction with job characteristics that are valued in individualistic nations (i.e., characteristics positively associated with Hofstedes IDV factor) will have a progressively stronger influence on commitment as national individualism increases. Conversely, satisfaction with job characteristics that are valued in collectivist nations (i.e., negatively associated with Hofstedes IDV factor) will have a progressively weaker influence on commitment as national individualism increases. Hypothesis 2: Satisfaction with job characteristics that are valued in masculine nations (i.e., characteristics positively associated with Hofstedes MAS factor) will have a progressively stronger influence on commitment as national masculinity increases. Conversely, satisfaction with job characteristics that are valued in feminine cultures (i.e., negatively associated with Hofstedes MAS factor) will have a progressively weaker influence on commitment as national masculinity increases.

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Method
Analysis Sample
The data were drawn from an employee satisfaction survey conducted in a large multinational pharmaceutical company. The survey (conducted globally every 2 years) was administered by a commercial survey provider and was designed to monitor opinions on a wide range of work-related topics and not for the purposes of this study. There were 100 survey items, and responses were measured on a 5-point Likert-type scale, with endpoints labeled agree and disagree and with higher numbers representing increasing degrees of favorability. The survey was administered in the local language, and items were back-translated to ensure accuracy. All company employees were invited to take part in the survey, which was completed online by 66.6% of respondents and on paper by the remainder, and a combined data file was made available to the researchers (note that methodological biases between electronic and traditional pencil-and-paper surveys are usually small and nonsignificant; e.g., Knapp & Kirk, 2003; Mehta & Sivadas, 1995; Stanton, 1998). The total number of respondents was 51,380, and the response rate was 80%. A number of contextual factors probably contributed to this high response rate. These included assured anonymity of respondents, frequent and consistent communication with the workforce in the planning stages (e.g., via the company intranet), visible support for the survey project from senior executives, the appointment of local survey coordinators in each country, and agreed timetables for survey activities. The prompt dissemination of the results of previous surveys and an emphasis on local follow-up and action planning probably also stimulated positive attitudes toward the survey process and increased the likelihood of responding. For compatibility with Hofstedes data, Egypt (n = 181), Kuwait (n = 18), Saudi-Arabia (n = 101), and the United Arab Emirates (n = 40) were combined into a single Arab region. After eliminating countries with less than 100 respondents, there were 29 nations (i.e., 28 countries and one region) in common with Hofstedes data set. In this subset of the data, which comprised the analysis sample, there were 48,625 respondents and the median national sample size was 349. Tenure was recorded on a scale of 1 to 4, with successive points representing less than 2 years (19%), 2 to 5 years (28%), 5 to 10 years (25%), and more than 10 years (28%), with the remainder (0.2%) unspecified. Job level was recorded as a dichotomous variable according to whether a respondent had direct reports. Gender was recorded, but age was not. Sample characteristics for the 29 nations are listed in Table 1.

Analytical Strategy
The analysis consisted of several steps. First, we identified survey questions having similar content to Hofstedes items. We then constructed satisfaction scores for each and examined the statistical justification for aggregation to the cultural level. We then tested for moderation using a slopes-as-outcomes approach to analyzing multilevel data (Kreft & de Leeuw, 1998). This is a two-stage method, where regression parameters defined at the lower (individual) level are treated as outcomes that are subsequently analyzed at the higher (national) level. In Stage 1, we use regression modeling (with commitment as the dependent variable) to determine the influence of individualist, collectivist, masculine, and feminine job characteristics in each nation and then test for the moderating effects of national culture

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Table 1 National Samples

Nation Austria Australia Belgium Canada Switzerland Germany Denmark Spain Finland France United Kingdom Greece Indonesia India Italy Japan South Korea Malaysia Netherlands Norway Philippines Portugal Sweden Thailand Turkey Taiwan United States South Africa Arab regiona Overall N 154 732 447 1,137 157 1,260 203 879 194 1,809 8,226 349 311 798 1,774 2,486 239 121 268 243 599 159 10,334 216 478 180 14,276 260 336 48,625 % Male 43 49 43 47 46 53 29 64 35 46 53 66 58 81 57 73 70 46 39 45 57 57 43 31 63 56 50 37 82 48 % With Direct Reports 21 23 32 24 31 31 27 16 27 27 34 20 17 24 22 24 30 23 22 24 21 28 20 17 13 23 21 26 21 24 Mean Tenure Band 2.26 2.44 2.61 2.58 2.27 2.73 2.67 2.58 2.53 2.52 2.91 2.33 2.26 2.84 2.61 2.64 1.94 2.23 2.38 2.62 2.64 2.55 2.74 2.16 2.07 2.18 2.46 2.09 2.51 2.62

a. Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates.

in Stage 2. Rather than use regression slopes as the Stage 1 outcomes, however, we use measures of variable importance, as described below. The reason is that in the presence of correlated predictors, a variables regression slope does not accurately reflect its influence. Quantifying the influence of an independent variable in a regression equation is a seemingly simple problem but more complex than it first appears. In this article, we use relative importance (Budescu, 1993) as our measure of influence. Various definitions of regressor importance, and associated importance metrics, have been proposed over the years. According to Budescu, however, none of the previous measures are entirely satisfactory, and he therefore proposed a new method for quantifying importance called dominance analysis. Dominance analysis has been described in Budescu (1993) and Azen and Budescu (2003); these articles should be consulted for a complete account, but a brief summary is given here.

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Budescu defined the relative importance of a regression predictor as its proportionate contribution to the total explained variance, considering both its unique contribution and its contribution when combined with other predictors. Relative importance is assessed by examining all the possible regression equations that can be formed from the predictors. Suppose there are n predictors. We can enumerate the possible regression equations as follows: There is a single null equation with no predictor; there are n equations with a single predictor; there are n(n 1) / 2 equations with two predictors, and so on. Suppose we regress a dependent variable (Y) on two predictors (A and B). There are four regression models, viz. the null model, Y|A, Y|B, and Y|AB (where | indicates regressed on). The importance of a given predictor is calculated by adding it in turn to each of the equations in which it does not already participate and summing the increases in explained variance. This is done for each predictor, and an appropriate scaling is applied to find the relative importance of each predictor as a percentage. A particular advantage of this metric is that it provides an index of importance based on a predictors direct effect (i.e., when considered by itself), total effect (i.e., conditional on all other predictors), and partial effect (i.e., conditional on subsets of predictors) (Budescu, 1993, p. 544.) Furthermore, relative importances are additive and sum to the model R2. This permits a meaningful decomposition of model R2 even in the presence of collinearity among the predictors. For more than five predictors, the number of regression equations that must be solved becomes prohibitively large, and the calculations become impractical. However, Johnson (2000) developed a computationally efficient approximation that can be used with large numbers of predictors; it produces closely similar results to the longhand method (Azen & Budescu, 2003), and Johnsons approximation is used here.

Dependent Variable: Affective Commitment

Because our analysis examines cultural differences in the relationship between commitment and job satisfaction, affective commitment was chosen as the dependent variable for this study, in preference to its normative or continuance counterparts. As we were relying on archival data, it was not possible to use a standard commitment scale. Commitment was thus measured by two items: I am proud to work for [organization name] and I would recommend [organization name] as a good place to work. Similar items (I am proud to tell others that I am part of this organization and I talk up this organization to my friends as a great organization to work for) appear in the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ; Mowday, Steers, & Porter, 1979), which, as Dunham, Grube, and Castaeda (1994) have demonstrated, is a measure of affective rather than normative or continuance commitment. Both items (with similar changes in wording) also appear in Cook and Walls (1980) Organizational Commitment Scale, and the first item also appears in Marsden, Kalleberg, and Cooks (1993) measure of commitment designed for the 1991 General Social Survey.

Commitment Antecedents: Job Satisfaction Items

We examined the survey questionnaire for items similar in content to those by Hofstede and classified them according to their loadings on his Individualism/Collectivism and Masculinity/Femininity factors (Hofstedes factor loadings are reported in Table 2). Not all

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items could be matched exactly; for example, Hofstedes [Importance of] Opportunity for advancement to higher levels was matched to the slightly different survey item I have the opportunity for personal development and growth in my company. Nevertheless, reasonable matches were found for all except one of Hofstedes items ([Importance of] Live in a desirable area), for which there was no matching survey item. Next, items were designated as I, C, M, or F according to Hofstedes factor analytic loadings. For example, the survey item I have enough flexibility in my job to be able to balance my work and personal life was designated an I item because it corresponds to Job Characteristic A18, which loads positively on Hofstedes Individualism/Collectivism factor. I items assess satisfaction with job characteristics that are rated as important in Hofstedes individualistic cultures. Conversely, survey items assessing characteristics that are rated as important in Hofstedes collectivist cultures were designated C items and so on. Similarly, items loading positively on the Masculinity/Femininity factor were designated F, and those loading negatively were designated M. (Note that when calculating the Masculinity/Femininity scale, Hofstede reversed the sign of this factor.) Where a Hofstede item had salient loadings on both factors, the designation of the corresponding survey item was determined by the largest loading. Note that Job Characteristic A5, which has similar loadings on both factors, was initially assigned to M; as explained later, it was reassigned to I following further analysis.

Measurement Equivalence and Aggregation Issues

In any cross-cultural analysis, it is important to consider the extent to which the measures used are comparable across nations and consistently reliable within nations. These factors limit the degree to which aggregation to the national level is permissible. We calculated ICC1 and ICC2 statistics for commitment and each of the satisfaction measures defined in Table 2. ICC statistics are commonly used in organizational research to ascertain whether it is justifiable to aggregate individual scores to the group level (Bliese, 2000). ICC1, the intraclass correlation, is a measure of within-group consensus, and ICC2 is the reliability of the group mean that is formed when individual scores are aggregated; its value depends on the degree of group consensus and the average group size. We also examined the multiple-item measures (i.e., A7, A10, A11, A12, A13, A16, and Commitment) for measurement equivalence. Each measure was subjected to a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in which the measure was represented by a single latent variable and the factor loadings and error variances of the observed variables were constrained to equality across nations. Additionally, for the two-item measures, the error variances of the observed variables were set equal to each other to achieve model identification. Within-nation reliabilities were also calculated. The results are summarized in Table 3. The ICC1 values showed that on average, 7.4% of the variance of the job satisfaction scores was due to nation, and to determine the significance of the ICC1 values, we performed a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) on each measure. All the ANOVAs had significant (p < .001) between-nation effects, indicating that all the ICC1s were significantly different from zero. Common practice suggests that an ICC2 of at least .70 is acceptable (Klein et al., 2000, p. 518), and all the measures in Table 3 easily meet this criterion.

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608 Factor Loadingsb No.a I/C .46 .35 .37 .82 .40 .59 .69 .49 .56 .69 .63 .86 3 .40 1 3 2 2 3 2 1 .59 .70 .69 2 1 1 .54 1 M/F Survey Item or Sample Item A5 A6 A7 A8 A9 A10 A11 A12 A13 A15 A16 A17 A18 No. of Survey Items Designationc M M F C C M C I M F C I My work gives me a sense of personal accomplishment. No available item How satisfied are you with your pay? My team works well together. I receive the training and development I need to do my current job. How satisfied are you with your benefits package? In my company people are recognized for innovation. My work area is a safe place to work. I feel safe to express my opinions in my company. I have the opportunity for personal development and growth in my company. My immediate manager involves me in making decisions that affect my work. My job offers sufficient opportunity to use my skills and abilities. I have enough flexibility in my job to be able to balance my work and personal life.

Table 2 Mapping of Hofstedes Job Characteristics to Survey Items

Job Characteristic

Sense of personal achievement

Live in a desirable area Opportunity for high earnings People who cooperate with each other Training opportunities

Good fringe benefits Recognition for a good job Good physical working conditions Freedom to adopt own approach to the job Opportunity for advancement to higher levels

Good work relationship with manager

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Fully use skills and abilities

Time for personal or family life

Note: Job Characteristic A5 was reassigned to I in later analysis. a. See Hosftede (2001, pp. 467-468). b. See Hofstede (2001, p. 255). c. I = Individualist; C = Collectivist; M = Masculine; F = Feminine.

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Table 3 Measurement Equivalence and Aggregation Statistics for Satisfaction and Commitment Measures
Multigroup CFA Statistics 2 Multiple-Item Measures A7 A10 A11 A12 A13 A16 A18 Commitment Single-item measures A5 A8 A9 A15 A17 543 1,008 688 3,152 547 1,319 1,228 2,509 df 56 56 56 140 56 140 140 56 Alpha Reliabilities Within Country ICC2 .99 .99 .99 .99 .97 .97 .99 .99 .99 .97 .97 .98 .97

GFI CFI TLI RMSEA Median Minimum ICC1a .99 .98 .99 .96 .99 .98 .98 .95 .98 .93 .95 .88 .96 .98 .97 .93 .99 .97 .98 .92 .98 .99 .98 .97 .014 .019 .015 .021 .013 .013 .013 .030 .64 .75 .65 .69 .65 .76 .80 .82 .47 .59 .45 .39 .50 .66 .64 .68 .11 .13 .11 .12 .06 .03 .06 .09 .07 .05 .05 .05 .04

Note: df = degrees of freedom; GFI = Goodness of Fit Index; CFI = Comparative Fit Index; TLI = Tucker-Lewis Index; RMSEA = Root Mean Square Error of Approximation. a. Random effects model.

As shown by the CFA fit indices, all the multiple-item measures showed a high degree of measurement equivalence. Median alpha reliabilities were less satisfactory but still adequate. Using the criteria for research scales proposed by Devellis (2003), three are in the minimally acceptable range (.65 to .70), two are respectable (.70 to .80), two very good (.80 to .90), and only one is undesirable (.60 to .65). Overall, we may conclude that the satisfaction measures defined in Table 3 meet the conditions for a cross-cultural analysis. Commitment scores and satisfaction scores for the 12 job characteristics were computed for each employee. Where a measure was represented by more than one item, its score was the mean of the constituent items. Employee scores were then aggregated to the national level.

Control Variables
Gender (0 for females and 1 for males), job level (0 for a respondent with no direct reports, 1 for a respondent with direct reports), and tenure band (1 = less than 2 years, 2 = 2 to 5 years, 3 = 5 to 10 years, 4 = more than 10 years) were used as control variables.

Cultural Dimensions
National measures of IDV and MAS were taken from Hoftsede (2001, p. 500).

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Analysis and Results

To assess the relationship between commitment and its antecedents, we conducted a series of regression analyses. In each case, commitment was regressed on the demographic controls and a subset of the job satisfaction scores. Separate regressions were carried out in each of the 29 nations. Johnsons (2000) method was used to calculate the relative importances of each job characteristic in each nation. We investigated two regression models. Model 1 examined satisfaction with individualist (I) and collectivist (C) job characteristics, and Model 2 examined satisfaction with masculine (M) and feminine (F) job characteristics. The independent variables were the relevant satisfaction scores for each job characteristic, and gender, tenure, and job level were included as controls. For each nation, we calculated the relative importance of each job characteristic and control variable and then summed the importances of each subset of variables (controls, I characteristics, C characteristics, M characteristics, and F characteristics) to give the total importance for each subset. Finally, we determined the moderating effect of national culture by correlating the importances of the job characteristics in each nation with Hofstedes national scores for individualism and masculinity. In an initial analysis, not reported here, we found that the effect of Job Characteristic A5 (initially designated as M) was significantly moderated by country individualism but not by masculinity. As shown in Table 2, however, A5 has similar loadings on both Hofstedes factors and its designation is somewhat open to question; we therefore redesignated A5 as an I characteristic. The results we report are after this reassignment. Regression and importance statistics are shown in Table 4, where to conserve space we summarize across the 29 nations rather than report the results for each nation separately. The R2 values in Table 4 show that the independent variables explain a substantial proportion of commitment variance in most nations (on average 49.4% in Model 1 and 42.4% in Model 2). The control variables are generally weak predictors, with relative importances of only 3.1% in Model 1 and 3.5% in Model 2. In Model 1, the I and C characteristics both have substantial effects on commitment (average importances 55% and 41.9%, respectively), but in Model 2, the overall importance of the F characteristics (25.4%) was substantially less than that of the M characteristics (71.2%). This might indicate that feminine job characteristics are intrinsically less strongly related to commitment than masculine ones, but another explanation is that omission of the Facet A6, for which there was no available survey item, meant that the feminine work domain was not fully represented. In any case, it is the variation in importance levels by nation that matters, and absolute importance levels are not relevant to our calculations. Table 5 shows the correlations of Hofstedes IDV and MAS dimensions with the relative importances of each antecedent and antecedent subset. A significant correlation indicates that a dimension moderates the commitment-antecedent relationship.1 In Model 1, the moderating effects of individualism are revealed by the positive correlations between IDV and the relative importance of I characteristics, which show that I characteristics are stronger antecedents of commitment in individualist nations than in collectivist ones. Similarly, the negative correlations between IDV and the relative importance of C characteristics show that C characteristics are stronger antecedents in collectivist nations. Although not all job characteristics show the effect, significant correlations in the

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Table 4 Summary of Regression and Dominance Analyses in 29 Nations

Unstandardized Regression Coefficients Independent Variables M SD Min. Max. Relative Importance as Predictor of Commitment (%) M SD Min. Max.

Model 1: Satisfaction With Individualist (I) vs. Collectivist (C) Job Characteristics Controls Gender Tenure Org. level All controls A5 A13 A18 All I A9 A10 A12 A17 All C 0.01 0.05 0.01 0.25 0.21 0.12 0.08 0.13 0.10 0.08 49.4 0.06 0.05 0.04 0.08 0.08 0.07 0.06 0.06 0.05 0.08 5.7 0.13 0.17 0.09 0.04 0.04 0.04 0.02 0.02 0.03 0.08 38.0 0.15 0.06 0.06 0.32 0.33 0.27 0.21 0.27 0.22 0.25 58.3 1.0 1.4 0.7 3.1 21.7 20.3 12.9 55.0 8.6 11.3 9.4 12.5 41.9 1.6 1.2 0.4 1.9 6.1 5.8 4.9 8.2 3.7 4.0 4.0 4.8 7.8 0.0 0.2 0.1 0.7 6.3 9.8 5.7 37.0 3.7 4.3 2.3 4.0 28.3 8.1 5.8 1.8 9.0 32.9 31.5 24.4 66.7 17.0 20.6 19.0 24.9 60.7

R2

Model 2: Satisfaction With Masculine (M) vs. Feminine (F) Job Characteristics Controls Gender Tenure Org. level All controls A7 A11 A15 All M A8 A16 All F 0.01 0.02 0.02 0.15 0.26 0.23 0.11 0.11 42.4 0.06 0.05 0.04 0.06 0.06 0.06 0.07 0.07 4.4 0.10 0.12 0.10 0.01 0.16 0.13 0.09 0.01 33.6 0.15 0.07 0.09 0.24 0.46 0.39 0.25 0.24 52.6 1.1 1.4 0.9 3.5 16.5 28.5 26.3 71.2 10.7 14.7 25.4 1.7 1.3 0.8 2.0 4.7 6.0 5.9 6.7 4.7 5.2 7.1 0.0 0.2 0.1 0.5 4.3 19.6 16.3 59.8 0.5 6.4 7.9 8.2 6.6 3.8 9.4 24.3 46.9 39.7 85.2 21.4 27.4 37.2

R2

Note: N = 29, SD = standard deviation.

expected direction are obtained for four of the seven job characteristics and for the summed importances of the I and C characteristics. Hypothesis 1 is thus supported. In Model 2, the moderating effects of masculinity are indicated by positive correlations between MAS and the relative importance of M characteristics and by negative correlations between MAS and the relative importance of F characteristics. The findings here are less clear cut; three of the five job characteristics show a salient correlation in the predicted direction, but only one of these reaches significance. However, the summed importances of the M and F characteristics do correlate significantly with MAS in the predicted directions, and the findings therefore offer qualified support for Hypothesis 2.

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Table 5 Correlations of National Individualism and Masculinity Scores With Relative Importances
IDV Model 1 Controls Gender Tenure Org. level All controls A5: Sense of personal achievement A13: Freedom to adopt own approach to the job A18: Time for personal or family life All I characteristics A9: Training opportunities A10: Good fringe benefits A12: Good physical working conditions A17: Fully use skills and abilities All C characteristics Gender Tenure Org. level All controls A7: Opportunity for high earnings A11: Recognition for a good job A15: Opportunity for advancement to higher levels All M characteristics A8: People who cooperate with each other A16: Good work relationship with manager All F characteristics .33 .07 .06 .32 .39* .54** .03 .69*** .40* .12 .56** .19 .65*** .35 .18 .21 .33 .19 .13 .16 .11 .12 .37* .20 MAS .05 .23 .28 .16 .12 .17 .11 .10 .36 .10 .01 .25 .06 .05 .15 .09 .10 .35 .17 .35 .40* .08 .47* .40*

I characteristics

C characteristics

Model 2 Controls

M characteristics

F characteristics

Note: N = 29. IDV = national individualism; MAS = national masculinity (Hofstede, 2001). *p .05. **p .01. ***p .001.

Discussion
This research was subject to some methodological limitations. First, our analytical sample was not a statistically representative one, as the respondents were all employees of the same multinational organization. Similar samples have of course been frequently used in cross-cultural research before (e.g., Hofstede, 1980, 2001; Palich et al., 1995; Vandenberghe et al., 2001). Furthermore, Hofstede, Neuijen, Ohayv, and Sanders (1990) have shown that national culture is a stronger determinant of employee values than organizational membership, so this potential source of bias may not be as serious as imagined. A second potential problem is that only two items were available to measure affective commitment, and a broader measure would have been preferable. As a test of validity, we checked our commitment measure against scores for the item I feel a strong sense of commitment to my organization in a database containing representative samples of 12 national

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workforces overlapping with our data. The correlation was .69 (p = .013), providing some reassurance our two-item measure is a reasonable indicator of national commitment levels. Finally, we note that all the data were self-reported and that some of the observed relationships may be subject to common method variance. This, however, can be confidently ruled out as an explanation of our findings. The results show different correlations between commitment and its antecedents in different nations and different correlations for individualist and collectivist job characteristics. If there were no cultural moderation effects, we would have to suppose that common method variance differed for individualist and collectivist job characteristics and moreover was higher for individualist characteristics in individualist nations, a conjecture that seems unlikely to say the least. Theory supposes that the relationships between organizational commitment and its antecedents and consequences should be moderated by cultural values, but previous attempts at empirical confirmation have proved disappointing. The contribution of this article is to demonstrate the existence of significant moderating effectsin the predicted directionsfor individualism and masculinity. Satisfaction with job characteristics that are highly valued (overtly rated as important) in individualistic cultures has a progressively stronger influence on commitment as national individualism increases, while for characteristics that are highly valued in collectivist cultures, the effects of satisfaction decrease with increasing individualism. Similarly, satisfaction with job characteristics that are highly valued in masculine cultures has a progressively stronger influence on commitment as national masculinity increases, while for characteristics highly valued in feminine nations, the effects of satisfaction decrease with increasing masculinity. These results contrast with those of Palich et al. (1995), who reported no such moderation in the antecedents of commitment, and those of Vandenberghe et al. (2001), who reported no such moderation in its consequences. One reason may be that their samples (15 and 12 nations, respectively) were smaller than those used here and were less representative because they were confined to Western countries; both factors may have limited the ability to detect moderating effects. A further distinctive feature of the present research is that the job characteristics we examined were carefully matched to those used by Hofstede to define his cultural dimensions, which may also have increased sensitivity to the effects of his cultural dimensions. Cross-cultural variation in the sources of commitment has practical implications for human resource management, where increasing globalization (connectivity and integration) in the economic sphere is leading to more cross-national partnerships, corporate mergers, and outsourcing ventures, resulting in increasing contacts between managers and workforces from different cultures. Managing in a culturally diverse environment requires new knowledge, and the data in Table 5 suggest some specific recommendations. Work that fosters a sense of personal achievement and that allows employees some flexibility and discretion is an important source of commitment in individualistic nations but less so in collectivist ones. We suggest that careful job design is thus of particular importance in individualistic nations. Conversely, in collectivist nations, we would recommend that managers pay particular attention to providing comfortable working conditions and access to training opportunities. The differences between masculine and feminine nations are less clear cut but suggest that the encouragement of good managersubordinate relationships should be particularly emphasized in feminine nations.

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An obvious direction for future research is to test for the moderating effects of other cultural dimensions. However, as Gelfand, Erez, and Aycan (2007) remark, the explanation of cultural differences in organizational behavior needs to move beyond consideration of cultural values alone. It is clear that, at the fine-grained level of specific job characteristics, the cultural effects that we report are still somewhat inconsistent with theory, in that some job characteristics show no discernable moderation. The failure to consistently confirm the predicted moderating effects in this and other research could indicate that the values-asmoderators framework provides an incomplete theoretical model of the commitment process. One variable that might produce cross-cultural differences is the psychological contract (e.g., Rousseau, 1989, 1995). The development of attitudes such as commitment is generally thought to occur within the context of an implied contractual relationship, which represents the mutual beliefs, perceptions, and informal obligations between an employer and an employee and sets the expectations and boundaries for the association. To function as a source of commitment in a particular culture, a job characteristic needs to be both highly valued and to be a normative element within the psychological contract. Aspects of the work environment that are excluded from, or peripheral to, the normative psychological contract are not psychologically attributable to the organization and are thus less likely to affect levels of commitment than aspects that are central. There is good reason to believe that the scope of the typical psychological contract varies across cultures. For example, in contrast to Western societies, employment relationships in developing countries are heavily grounded in interpersonal relationships and familial/ community sharing (e.g., Restubog & Bordia, 2006). Smith, Dugan, and Trompenaars (1996) have also shown that employers are expected to be more paternalistic in collectivist nations than in individualistic ones (see also Rousseau & Schalk, 2000). To illustrate how values and contractual contexts might interact, consider Facet A18 (importance of having sufficient time for personal and family life), for which we observe no discernable moderating effect of culture. In individualist nations, this is highly valued, but it tends to be peripheral to the psychological contract because employers are not seen as responsible for the employees life outside the work place. If this pattern of high value and low centrality in individualist cultures is mirrored by low value and high centrality in collectivist ones, the effects of value and centrality will counteract one another, and no cross-cultural moderation will be observed. We therefore suggest that examination of the role of the psychological contract, and its divergent scope in different cultures, might lead to a deeper understanding of cross-cultural variation in the sources of organizational commitment.

Note
1. A moderator is a variable that affects the direction and/or strength of the relation between an independent or predictor variable and a dependent or criterion variable (Baron & Kenny, 1986, p. 1174). In the context of a single ordinary least squares regression equation, moderation is usually tested by examining the significance of an interaction term, but this of course is not the only way to detect moderation.

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Garry Gelade is a research fellow at Cass Business School and the director of Business Analytic Ltd, a provider of organizational research services to corporate and government clients. He received his masters degree in natural sciences from Cambridge University and his PhD from the University of Nottingham. His current research interests include employee attitudes and creative thinking in organizations. Paul Dobson is a chartered psychologist and senior lecturer in organizational behaviour at Cass Business School. His research interests include the assessment and development of team leadership skills in multicultural groups. Katharina Auer is a specialist in strategic corporate communications and is head of Shells Global Internal and Management Communications function. In her role, she is responsible for internal communication at the group level, developing and executing internal communications strategy. Prior to joining Shell in 2007, she was head of Global Internal Communications at Astrazeneca, where she led the companys global employee survey project.

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