Cultural values on attitudes and work behaviors

Employing Hofstede's cultural index, this study examines the level of effects of cultural values (traditionality, collectivism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance) on employees' attitudes and work behaviors to compare the influential power of those values between Korea and China, which share similar social norm, Confucianism (Froese, 2013). The recent studies argued that the economic development and diversity in ethnicities did lead to changes in these two countries' cultural indices from the 1980 and 1994 Hofstede's studies (Froese, 2013; Kwon, 2012; Kwon & Kim, 2007). From the identified changes in values of two countries, this study asks whether the combination of mixed cultural values from the changes results in culturally different managerial issues. Survey was conducted in both countries, yielding the 417 responses: 206 from China and 211 from Korea, yielding 68.7% and 67.6% of usable response rate, respectively. 54.5 percent of the respondents were male, 63.2 percent were married, 89.7 percent had more than undergraduate degrees, and 75.9 percent were full-time workers. The respondents' average organizational tenure and team tenure were 6.38 years and 3.74 years, respectively. The results demonstrated that there were some cross-national differences in the effects of cultural values on the LMX quality, work attitudes and work behaviors. Cultural values (uncertainty avoidance) and a norm (traditionality) on the LMX quality and affective organizational commitment explained more of Korean workers than of Chinese workers, whereas power distance on continuance organizational commitment made significant effects in both countries. For in-role behaviors, such as job performance, uncertainty avoidance made significant effects in two countries' workers. However, collectivism made a negative effect on Chinese workers' in-role behaviors while power distance did on Korean workers. For extra-role behaviors, such as helping behavior, the two countries' workers were influenced by uncertainty avoidance.