Cultural differences in prioritizing applicant attributes when assessing employment suitability

Abstract

We examined how culture influences perceptions of applicant attributes when assessing employment suitability. In two studies (N = 408), we compared members from a collectivistic society (Singapore) to two samples from individualistic societies (the United States and Australia) on their perceptions of applicant attributes across job contexts. For each job, participants either chose between candidates with different attribute profiles or created ideal candidates by allocating a fixed amount of percentile points across different attributes. More often than Australians, Singaporeans chose the candidate with higher levels of the trait (e.g., openness to experience) uniquely associated with the job (e.g., graphic designer). More so than either Americans or Australians, Singaporeans prioritized having the trait most associated with each job. Members from collectivistic societies may require higher levels of the traits most associated with different jobs than members from individualistic societies, who prefer more well-rounded individuals for each job. As discussed, the study of lay perceptions may have implications for training hiring professionals and managers.

Keywords:

• Context salience
• Decision-making
• Personality
• Selection

Notes

1. Because target sex was not the focus of this article, and Bonferroni corrected t-tests indicated that eight out of the ten possible pairwise comparisons were not significant, responses were aggregated across target sex to minimize the complexity of subsequent analyses.

2. A plausible alternative explanation for our results is that Singaporeans were simply more careful in responding to the stimuli. If this were true, we expected that Singaporeans would have a smaller mean SD across all point allocations (i.e., tighter clustering of responses around the sample mean), compared to either Americans or Australians. We examined this hypothesis with data from Study 2, and found that the converse was supported—a larger mean SD (11.78) was found in the Singaporean sample as compared to the Australian sample (8.75). Thus, although response style provides one possible explanation for our results, our examination of the data suggests that it is unlikely to account for the differences that we observed across groups.