The Relationships between Cultural Values, Work Beliefs, and Attitudes towards Socioeconomic Issues: A Cross-Cultural Study.

This section presents an abstract of the study, The Relationships between Cultural Values, Work Beliefs, and Attitudes towards Socioeconomic Issues: A Cross-Cultural Study, conducted by Joel Dean Nicholson. A questionnaire was used to measure cultural values of individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, paternalism, work beliefs including the work ethic, humanism, Marxist beliefs, organizational beliefs and the leisure ethic and attitudes toward selected national and international business issues. The questionnaire was administered to approximately 1,000 students and managers/professionals in each of the three countries in their native languages. Significant differences in cultural values and work beliefs were revealed through multiple analyses of variance. Multiple regressions revealed several cultural values to be significant predictors of work beliefs. Finally, regression analyses revealed that different combinations of cultural values and work beliefs combined to explain a great deal of variance in attitudes toward socioeconomic issues of importance to international business. Implications for current theory and practice were discussed and directions for future research were given.