Discovering Culture’s Influence in Studies of Individual Behavior in Organizational Settings: A Challenging Proposal

Abstract

To broaden our understanding of culture-as-operative in organizational settings and make these cultural influences tractable to empirical analysis, we focus upon individual behavior as the outcome of interest and acknowledge the embeddedness of an organizational member in a nested and multiple array of cultures be they national, regional, organizational, or local-interpersonal. At any one of these levels, we may expect cross-cutting impacts of cultural identities built around ethnicity, organization type, company, work function, team, dyad, gender, education level and type, and age-generational cohort. We distinguish between the positioning and the moderating effects of culture, thus enabling an appreciation of the role that each type and level of culture plays in shaping individuals' actions in their immediate work environments. Our goal is not only to describe but also to explain how culture operates upon organizational members at each level of cultural influence and for each type of culturally shaped identity. This is a challenging task, but a broadened cultural appreciation and the availability of big data and the necessary statistical techniques to analyze its complexity make undertaking this initiative practicable in the 21st century. This current project on work-life balance hopes to inspire further work using this perspective.

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