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Individualism–collectivism as a moderator of the work demands–strains relationship: A cross-level and cross-national examination

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Abstract

Surveying 6509 managers from 24 countries/geopolitical entities, we tested the process through which individualism–collectivism at the country level relates to employees’ appraisals of and reactions to three types of work demands (i.e., work hours, workload, and organizational constraints). Our multilevel modeling results suggested that, while working the same number of hours, employees from individualistic countries reported a higher perceived workload than their counterparts in collectivistic countries. Furthermore, relationships of perceived workload and organizational constraints with job dissatisfaction and turnover intentions were stronger in individualistic than in collectivistic countries. Importantly, results of supplementary analyses suggested that the cultural value of individualism–collectivism moderated the mediation effect of perceived workload between work hours and both job dissatisfaction and turnover intentions. Our findings highlight the need to expand contemporary theories of work stress by applying multilevel approaches and incorporating cross-national differences in dimensions such as individualism–collectivism while studying how employees appraise and react to important work stressors.

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Notes

  1. Given that the rating of I-C as an institutional value from House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, and Gupta's (2004) Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) study was available for only 19 out of our 26 countries/regions, we decided to choose the combined I-C scores for 24 units from Spector et al. (2001) and Hofstede's (1980) studies, in order to preserve the statistical power of our analysis. In addition, following the suggestion by Brewer and Venaik (2011), Hofstede's framework of I-C is more appropriate for the present study, focusing on work demands, as opposed to that of GLOBE. As a matter of fact, we ran all analysis with GLOBE's ratings used for country-level I-C, and found a result pattern similar to that we present in this manuscript, except that the interactions between I-C and focal level 1 predictor were marginally significant (p<0.10) in most models we tested when GLOBE data were used.

  2. Details about the imputation process of I-C scores are available upon request to the senior author.

  3. In the archive of the World Bank, the PPP GDP, and PPP GDP per capita data for Taiwan were missing.

  4. The results of the first three HLM models related to each hypothesis were not presented in the tables, for the consideration of space limits. However, the results are available upon request to the senior author.

  5. The results with those relevant individual- or country-level variables controlled are available upon request to the senior author.

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Acknowledgements

The co-author Professor Luo Lu would like to acknowledge the support of E. SUN Bank in collecting data from the sample in Taiwan.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Portland State University, Portland, USA

    Liu-Qin Yang

  2. University of South Florida, Tampa, USA

    Paul E Spector & Tammy D Allen

  3. Florida International University, Miami, USA

    Juan I Sanchez

  4. EADA Business School, Barcelona, Spain

    Steven Poelmans

  5. Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    Cary L Cooper

  6. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

    Laurent M Lapierre

  7. University of Waikato, Waikato, New Zealand

    Michael P O'Driscoll

  8. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Nureya Abarca

  9. University of National and World Economy, Sofia, Bulgaria

    Matilda Alexandrova

  10. Athens University, Athens, Greece

    Alexandros-Stamatios Antoniou

  11. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Barbara Beham

  12. Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

    Paula Brough

  13. Suleyman Demirel University, Isparta, Turkey

    Ilker Çarikçi

  14. Universidad de Piura, Lima, Peru

    Pablo Ferreiro

  15. Austral University, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Guillermo Fraile

  16. Radboud University Nijmegen, Heijendaal, The Netherlands

    Sabine Geurts

  17. University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

    Ulla Kinnunen

  18. Peiking University, Beijing, China

    Chang-qin Lu

  19. National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Luo Lu

  20. University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus, San Juan, USA

    Ivonne F Moreno-Velázquez

  21. Al Ghurair University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

    Milan Pagon

  22. Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Horea Pitariu

  23. National Academy of Public Administration, Kiev, Ukraine

    Volodymyr Salamatov

  24. Lingnan University, Hong Kong, China

    Oi-ling Siu

  25. Kyoto Bunkyo University, Uji, Kyoto, Japan

    Satoru Shima

  26. Private University of Santa Cruz of the Sierra, Santa Cruz, Bolivia

    Marion K Schulmeyer

  27. Estonian Business School, Tallinn, Estonia

    Kati Tillemann

  28. Central Institute for Labor Protection, Warsaw, Poland

    Maria Widerszal-Bazyl

  29. Inje University, Seoul Paik Hospital, Seoul, South Korea

    Jong-Min Woo

Authors
  1. Liu-Qin Yang
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  2. Paul E Spector
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  3. Juan I Sanchez
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  4. Tammy D Allen
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  14. Ilker Çarikçi
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  15. Pablo Ferreiro
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  18. Ulla Kinnunen
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  19. Chang-qin Lu
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  20. Luo Lu
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  21. Ivonne F Moreno-Velázquez
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  22. Milan Pagon
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  24. Volodymyr Salamatov
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  25. Oi-ling Siu
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  26. Satoru Shima
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  27. Marion K Schulmeyer
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  28. Kati Tillemann
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  29. Maria Widerszal-Bazyl
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  30. Jong-Min Woo
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Additional information

Accepted by David C. Thomas, Area Editor, 14 November 2011. This paper has been with the authors for three revisions.

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Yang, LQ., Spector, P., Sanchez, J. et al. Individualism–collectivism as a moderator of the work demands–strains relationship: A cross-level and cross-national examination. J Int Bus Stud 43, 424–443 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2011.58

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2011.58

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