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A cross-cultural examination of the relationships between job attitudes and workplace deviance

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Abstract

A growing scientific literature has examined the predictors of workplace deviance, with much of this research focusing on job attitudes—particularly job satisfaction and organizational commitment—as antecedent variables. Because this research has primarily been conducted within North America, little is known about whether or not the relationships between attitudes and deviance vary across cultures. Thus, in the current research we examined the job attitude-workplace deviance relationship using data collected from workers in four different countries (i.e., China, India, Malaysia, and New Zealand) and meta-analysis. Results for the Malaysian and New Zealand samples indicated that job attitudes were negatively associated with all three measures of workplace deviance. Within the Chinese sample, job satisfaction and organizational commitment were only modestly related to three and two measures of workplace deviance, respectively. Moreover, within the Indian sample, job attitudes were not significantly related to any form of workplace deviance. Finally, the meta-analytic comparisons lent further support to the variability in the job attitude-workplace deviance relationship across cultures.

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Notes

  1. We conducted the PsycINFO search on February 5th, 2018 using “workplace deviance” as the search term.

  2. These country-level scores can also be obtained from geert-hostede.com.

  3. More information about these data is available from the first author.

  4. Bennett and Robinson’s (2000) measure of deviance directed at people originally included 7 items. We removed the item “Made an ethnic, religious, or racial remark at work,” however, because we believed that it would be unnecessary to include in the survey used in the more homogenous samples (e.g., the Chinese sample).

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No. 17BGL100).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Administration, School of Business, East China University of Science and Technology, 130 Meilong Rd., Shanghai, 200237, People’s Republic of China

    Qiang Wang

  2. Department of Psychology, Sunway University, 5 Jalan Universiti, 47500, Bandar Sunway, Selangor, Malaysia

    Mei-Hua Lin

  3. Department of Psychology, The University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK, USA

    Anupama Narayan

  4. School of Psychology, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, FL, USA

    Gary N. Burns

  5. Department of Psychology, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA

    Nathan A. Bowling

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  1. Qiang Wang
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Correspondence to Qiang Wang.

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Wang, Q., Lin, MH., Narayan, A. et al. A cross-cultural examination of the relationships between job attitudes and workplace deviance. Asia Pac J Manag 39, 249–272 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-020-09721-1

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