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National culture and friendship homophily in the multinational workplace

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Abstract

This article argues that cultural differences can be understood in terms of demographic homophily patterns. We test this argument by comparing friendship homophily in nationality and gender between two cultural groups (Korean and American employees) from within a multi-national corporation. Korean employees showed stronger nationality homophily owing to their collectivistic values. Confucian culture strengthened the gender homophily of the East Asian employees, especially female employees. Finally, compared to the Korean employees, the affective closeness of the US employees’ friendship ties was significantly affected by friendship tie multiplexity, showing this group's instrumental disposition.

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Notes

  1. In this article, ‘ego’ is defined as an employee who is the subject of friendship ties, whereas ‘alter’ is defined as the object of friendship ties. For example, when employee A designates B as his or her friend, we call A and B ego and alter, respectively.

  2. While the survey was administered some years ago (2003), the results still appear valid for the current workplace, according to ongoing interviews with the company, as well as anecdotal evidence from other multinational companies. We plan to conduct a follow-up survey with the company, which will allow us to investigate the extent of changes in the relationship between national culture and friendship homophily.

  3. The US employees were composed of whites (98), Korean American (11) and other ethnicities (5). In a separate analysis, we only used the white group as US employees, and found no significant differences from the results reported in this article.

  4. The fact that a coefficient is significant for one group and insignificant for the other does not directly imply significant difference in the coefficients between the two groups. In testing our hypotheses, thus, we compared the coefficients of the variables in point between the two groups by doing t-tests. The results of these analyses, available from the author upon request, all support the conclusions presented here.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2010-330-B00100). We are very grateful to Jim Baron, Kwok Leung, Jeff Pfeffer and Ezra Zuckerman for comments on previons versions of this article. We also thank Hongseok Oh for his inputs to crafting the survey questionnaire of this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Hawaii, Shidler College of Business, 2404 Maile Way, Honolulu, Hawaii, 96822, USA

    Mooweon Rhee & Daegyu Yang

  2. Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, College of Business Administration, 270 Imun-dong, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, 130-791, Republic of Korea

    Taeyoung Yoo

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  1. Mooweon Rhee
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  2. Daegyu Yang
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Correspondence to Taeyoung Yoo.

Appendix

Appendix

Name-generating questions used in questionnaire

Friendship

List people who have been, in your view, personal friends over the past 6 months, that is, those people you see most frequently for informal social activities such as going out to lunch, dinner, drinks, visiting one another's home and so on?

Task-advice

List people who, in your view, have been valued sources of work-related advice over the past 6 months, that is, people to whom you talk when you have a work-related problem or when you want advice on a decision you have to make.

Information

List people on whom, over the past 6 months, you have relied as sources for general information on the ‘goings-on’ at your company – people who have given you special insights into the goals and strategies of important individuals, divisions, or perhaps even the firm as a whole.

Career support

List people who you feel have contributed most to your professional growth and development. Please include people who have taken active interest in and concerted action to advance your career.

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Rhee, M., Yang, D. & Yoo, T. National culture and friendship homophily in the multinational workplace. Asian Bus Manage 12, 299–320 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/abm.2012.23

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