TY - JOUR
T1 - Values congruence, organization-based self-esteem, and employee responses
T2 - Evidence from Sri Lanka
AU - Gardner, Donald G.
AU - Wickramasinghe, Vathsala
AU - Pierce, Jon L.
PY - 2018/12/1
Y1 - 2018/12/1
N2 - Expatriate managers are often advised to adapt their leadership styles and organizational cultures to the culture of the country in which they operate. This advice appears to be reasonable, but it has rarely been empirically tested. In this study, we examine the degree to which congruence of organization and individual cultural values affect employees. We collected data from business managers and executives in Sri Lanka, a country that has not been well studied by international management scholars. We hypothesized that personally embraced values that are consistent with broader cultural values would have relationships with self-esteem. Further, because people are also motivated to verify and enhance their levels of self-esteem in culturally consistent ways, we hypothesized that self-esteem at work would mediate relationships of values with prosocial motivation and intent to maintain membership in the organization. We found that culturally consistent, self-transcendence personal values did relate uniquely to organization-based self-esteem (OBSE). In addition, OBSE mediated the relationships between self-transcendence values, and work-based prosocial motivation and intent to stay. Moderated mediation analyses revealed that strong values fit weakened the mediating effect of OBSE on self-transcendence—outcomes and conservation—outcome relationships, contrary to our hypotheses. It appears that the advice to modify organizational culture to fit local culture should be qualified by also recommending that such changes are not conflict with the organization’s existing, successful culture. Our study also sheds some light on the cultural values of Sri Lanka. This is the first study to explicitly examine these relationships within a work context as well as one of few studies to examine personal values in Sri Lanka.
AB - Expatriate managers are often advised to adapt their leadership styles and organizational cultures to the culture of the country in which they operate. This advice appears to be reasonable, but it has rarely been empirically tested. In this study, we examine the degree to which congruence of organization and individual cultural values affect employees. We collected data from business managers and executives in Sri Lanka, a country that has not been well studied by international management scholars. We hypothesized that personally embraced values that are consistent with broader cultural values would have relationships with self-esteem. Further, because people are also motivated to verify and enhance their levels of self-esteem in culturally consistent ways, we hypothesized that self-esteem at work would mediate relationships of values with prosocial motivation and intent to maintain membership in the organization. We found that culturally consistent, self-transcendence personal values did relate uniquely to organization-based self-esteem (OBSE). In addition, OBSE mediated the relationships between self-transcendence values, and work-based prosocial motivation and intent to stay. Moderated mediation analyses revealed that strong values fit weakened the mediating effect of OBSE on self-transcendence—outcomes and conservation—outcome relationships, contrary to our hypotheses. It appears that the advice to modify organizational culture to fit local culture should be qualified by also recommending that such changes are not conflict with the organization’s existing, successful culture. Our study also sheds some light on the cultural values of Sri Lanka. This is the first study to explicitly examine these relationships within a work context as well as one of few studies to examine personal values in Sri Lanka.
KW - Culture
KW - Sri Lanka
KW - self-enhancement
KW - self-esteem
KW - self-verification
KW - values
KW - values fit
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U2 - 10.1177/1470595818814053
DO - 10.1177/1470595818814053
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85058528407
VL - 18
SP - 349
EP - 372
JO - International Journal of Cross Cultural Management
JF - International Journal of Cross Cultural Management
SN - 1470-5958
IS - 3
ER -