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The impact of societal cultural values and individual social beliefs on the perceived effectiveness of managerial influence strategies: a meso approach

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Abstract

This paper reports the findings of a 12-nation study designed to test empirically the relationships between societal cultural values, individual social beliefs, and the perceived effectiveness of different influence strategies. The relationships between three types of broad influence strategy (persuasive, assertive, and relationship based) and four dimensions of individual beliefs (cynicism, fate control, reward for application, and religiosity) were examined. Three of Project GLOBE's cultural values (in-group collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and future orientation) were selected to investigate their direct effects on the rated effectiveness of influence strategies, and their possible interaction with dimensions of individual beliefs. Results showed that different dimensions of individual social beliefs predict the perceived effectiveness of the three types of influence strategy, and that cultural values can moderate the strength of the relationship between these dimensions of individual social beliefs and the perceived effectiveness of influence strategies.

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Notes

  1. Three influence strategies (persuasive, assertive, and relationship based) were obtained by collapsing 16 proactive influence tactics (see Sun and Bond, 2000; Lee and Sweeney, 2001) in a pilot study to refer to a higher level of generality than the specific tactics for the purpose of the study (see Methods section for the details). Most of the 16 tactics were identified by previous studies (e.g., Kipnis et al., 1980; Kipnis and Schmidt, 1982; Yukl and Tracey, 1992; Yukl et al., 1995; Fu and Yukl, 2000).

  2. The nine cultural dimensions developed by Project GLOBE are: (1) uncertainty avoidance, (2) power distance, (3) societal emphasis on collectivism, (4) in-group collectivism, (5) gender egalitarianism, (6) assertiveness, (7) future orientation, (8) performance orientation, and (9) humane orientation.

  3. We decided to restrict our investigation to three cultural dimensions so as to increase the power of our statistical analyses. We examined the existing literature on influence behavior to ascertain which dimensions of national culture would have the strongest theoretical and empirical support, and used our judgment to identify those dimensions that we felt could be best connected to both influence strategies and social beliefs. A case could be made for including other variables, and power distance is a leading example. Kennedy et al. (2003) identified the role of both power distance and in-group collectivism in distinguishing between patterns of influence tactics across countries, and concluded that in-group collectivism accounted for more unique variance (as well as capturing much of the variance explained by power distance). We therefore included in-group collectivism in preference to power distance. As stated in our Discussion section, we recommend that future researchers examine other countries and expand our model to include additional cultural dimensions.

  4. Countries were not all equivalent across demographic variables such as age, gender, and education. However, there were no significant gender differences on any of the social belief or influence strategy variables. The largest correlation with a demographic variable was between education and reward for application (r=−0.14, P<0.001), but controlling for education did not affect the positive relationship between reward for application and endorsement of the persuasive strategy (H2). Therefore, for the sake of parsimony, we excluded demographic variables from the analyses reported in the results section.

  5. In our pilot study, coauthors in the 12 participating cultures were asked to use the scenarios as exercises in MBA classes or executive leadership training programs, recording participants' answers to the open-ended question: ‘What tactics would be effective in influencing the target person to … (influence purpose tailored to the situation)?’ Responses relevant to the scenario were all listed together and sent to the first author. There were several hundred tactics when the lists from several cultures were combined. Two of the authors went through the lists and coded the items to make sure that we had obtained a relatively comprehensive set of tactics. No ‘unique’ tactic was encountered, but a few of the responses prompt our decision to include ‘socializing’ as a new tactic. Our final choice of the 16 tactics thus combines an imposed-etic component, using tactics previously identified in (predominately) American research, with an emic component generated by researchers within each country to yield a derived-etic measure.

  6. To check the effect of possible country-level response biases, we followed Triandis' (1995) suggestion and standardized responses to all items within individuals before composing the scales. We then used the standardized scores to make up the influence strategy scales. The patterns of results for raw scores and the standardized scores were very similar. Given the equivalence of results, and the greater ease of interpretation of raw score analysis, we report the analyses based on raw scores.

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Acknowledgements

This research project was made possible by funding from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong SAR (1999/2000 CUHK4050/99H). We would like to express their appreciation to the following individuals: to Professor Arie Y Lewin, JIBS Editor in Chief, and Danielle T Trojan, JIBS Managing Editor, for their thoughtful directions and help during the review process; to three JIBS reviewers, for their detailed comments and suggestions for improving the manuscript; and to Liu Jun for his help with the analyses of the data. A preliminary report of this project was presented at the Academy of Management Conference in Washington DC, August 2001.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chinese University of Hong Kong, Singapore

    Ping Ping Fu & Michael Harris Bond

  2. Nanyang Business School, Singapore

    Jeff Kennedy

  3. Loyola University Chicago, USA

    Jasmine Tata

  4. State University at Albany, USA

    Gary Yukl

  5. I-Shou University, Taiwan

    Tai-Kuang Peng

  6. Xavier Labour Relations Institute, Jamshedpur, India

    Ekkirala S Srinivas

  7. New Mexico State University, USA

    Jon P Howell & Leonel Prieto

  8. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Paul Koopman & Jaap J Boonstra

  9. Bogazici University Istanbul, Turkey

    Selda Pasa

  10. Lacassagne Université de Bourgogne, France

    Marie-Francoise Lacassagne

  11. Waseda University, Japan

    Hiro Higashide

  12. Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration of Chulalongkorn University, Thailand

    Adith Cheosakul

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  1. Ping Ping Fu
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Correspondence to Jasmine Tata.

Additional information

Accepted by Arie Lewin, Editor in Chief, 6 April 2004. This paper has been with the author for one revision.

Appendix A

Appendix A

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Table a1 Demographic characteristics for participating countriesc
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Fu, P., Kennedy, J., Tata, J. et al. The impact of societal cultural values and individual social beliefs on the perceived effectiveness of managerial influence strategies: a meso approach. J Int Bus Stud 35, 284–305 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400090

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