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Individualism and Working Hours: Macro-Level Evidence

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But more, much more than this

I did it my way

Frank Sinatra

Abstract

The individualism-collectivism dimension has established itself in interdisciplinary cross-cultural studies in recent decades as the most significant determinant for a variety of economic and institutional outcomes. Individualist societies are characterized by independent selves and loose social ties, and collectivist societies are typified by interdependent selves and strong social ties. In this article, we argue that employees in individualist (collectivist) societies tend to work less (more) since they tend to prioritize themselves and their families over their firms (vice versa), and employers can force employees less (more) and have a harder (easier) time forming a work environment in which long working hours prevail. Using a cross-country empirical analysis, we find that individualism is negatively and significantly associated with working hours. To address endogeneity problems, we use instrumental variables for individualism. Our results are robust to controlling for various relevant variables, employing different estimation techniques, and using different sample sizes.

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Notes

  1. One contentious issue that must be dealt with is whether individualism and collectivism are two poles of the same dimension or two different dimensions. According to Hofstede et al. (2010), individualism and collectivism appear as two poles of the same dimension at the country level. Moreover, empirical findings show that societies that score high on individualism tend to score low on collectivism on average, and vice versa. In line with this understanding and stance, researchers generally regard and conceptualize individualism and collectivism as opposites of one another on the same dimension in cross-cultural studies (Oyserman 2017, p. 3), which, we think, is the right and more frugal approach from a methodological point of view.

  2. On the other hand, as an outcome itself, various factors at the micro/meso level that allegedly have an effect on the I-C dimension have been identified in the literature. For example, individualism versus collectivism tends to be stronger among individuals in urban areas versus rural areas (Kashima et al., 2004), in upper classes versus lower classes (Marshall, 1997), in nuclear families versus extended-families, and more educated versus less educated and young versus elderly (Triandis & Gelfand 2012).

  3. When raising children, parents tend to inculcate independence and self-reliance into their children in individualist societies. On the other hand, they tend to instill obedience and reliability in them in collectivist societies (Triandis 1989, p. 510).

  4. Interestingly, Hofstede et al., (2010, p. 110) indicate that disobedience to social norms results in “guilt” (a self-centered emotion) in individualist societies and “shame” (a relational emotion) in collectivist societies. In line with this understanding, Heine et al. (2008) observe in two different tests that in the presence of mirror participants from individualistic countries become “more self-critical” (United States) and “less likely to cheat on a task” when they were alone (Canada), while the mirror has no effect at all on the participants of a collectivist society (Japan).

  5. In individualist societies; family ties, communication, and support are weaker (Georgas et al., 2001) and love is more important in marriage decisions (Levine et al., 1995), whereas in collectivist societies loyalty toward community is greater (Aycan et al., 2000; Aycan et al., 1999), family ties are stronger (Falicov 2001), and supporting and caring for elderly family members are of great importance (Aycan 2008).

  6. See Ollier-Malaterre & Foucreault (2017) for a comprehensive review.

  7. Working more or less has its own pros and cons from the perspective of employees. On the other hand, in general, employers want their employees to work as much/intensely as possible for obvious reasons. Therefore, while there is a concrete short/long term trade-off for employees regarding working hours, there seems no one such for employers in general. As a result of this general framework, many employees work more -sometimes much more- than they otherwise prefer to meet employer demands. However, one important qualification should be made here: for many part-timers not overworking but underworking is a problem for mostly financial reasons, though most part-timers are satisfied with their short workweek and do not consider switching to a full-time job.

  8. Extrinsic and intrinsic factors are all micro/personal variables and it is very hard, if not impossible, to derive macro equivalents of them. Because of this reason, there is no variable from these groups in our model.

  9. Particularly in a working environment where employees are encouraged to work long hours and there is a “rat race” between workers they end up working very long hours “inefficiently” (Akerlof 1976; Landers et al., 1996), in which presenteeism can prevail (Kodz et al., 1998) and dictates itself (Eastman 1998; Simpson 1998).

  10. Dataset ID: HOW_XEES_SEX_OCU_NB_A. Short URL: https://ilostat.ilo.org/data.

  11. This dataset is available in the following link: https://geerthofstede.com/research-and-vsm/dimension-data-matrix/.

  12. The effect of individualism is negative and statistically significant when continent dummies are also added into the specification.

  13. To save some space this result is not presented in Table 3, but it is available upon request.

  14. To address the reverse causality problem, we also prefer to use the lagged values of the union density data.

  15. When we drop individualism from the specification, the (positive) effect of UNEMP becomes statistically significant. This result is available upon request.

  16. The effect of income inequality is statistically significant when individualism is not added to the regression.

  17. To save some space we do not present this result in the manuscript. But it is available upon request.

  18. More information about this data is available from Hausmann et al., (2014).

  19. First-stage results are reported in “Appendix Table 9”.

  20. Alternative IVs can be obtained from genetic and epidemiological data. Following Chiao and Blizinsky (2010) and Way and Lieberman (2010), previous literature also uses the frequency of S allele in the polymorphic region 5-HTTLPR and the prevalence of the G allele in the A118G gene as IVs for individualism (see Gorodnichenko and Roland (2017) and Binder (2019)). Once we use 5-HTTLPR and A118G as alternative instruments, our results still demonstrate that there is a sizable and significant association between individualism and working hours. But these results suffer more from weak instrument bias, due mostly to small sample sizes. Few countries have both working hours and genetic/epidemiological data at the same time. One also should note that since the studies on the psychological effects of genetically based exogenous variables are part of a newly emerging literature, the results have not been fully established yet. For example, Persson et al. (2019) find that the statistical relation between A118G and social exclusion is weaker in a large sample. Therefore, we do not present these results in the manuscript. But they are available upon request.

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  1. School of Business and Management Sciences, Istanbul Medipol University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Mevlut Tatliyer & Nurullah Gur

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  1. Mevlut Tatliyer
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  2. Nurullah Gur
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M.T.: Building the theoretical framework, preparing the dataset, analyzing the empirical results, and writing the manuscript. N.G.: Preparing the dataset, running regressions, analyzing the empirical results, and writing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Mevlut Tatliyer.

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Appendix 1

Appendix 1

See Table 9.

Table 9 First Stage Results of Table 6
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Tatliyer, M., Gur, N. Individualism and Working Hours: Macro-Level Evidence. Soc Indic Res 159, 733–755 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-021-02771-y

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