The Impact of Societal Culture on the Use of Performance Strategies in East Asia: Evidence from a comparative survey

Abstract

The role of societal culture affecting bureaucratic processes is often suspected and asserted, but seldom researched in comparative ways. This article provides a general framework and systematic, comparative evidence showing societal values permeating organizational practices relating to performance. This study examines effects of work ethic, group belonging, and followership in a survey of public managers in South Korea, Mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia, India, and the United States. Results show (i) culture having foremost indirect effects on performance strategy and (ii) culture being as relevant an explanatory factor as HRM or leadership, when both direct and indirect effects of culture are considered. A key study implication is that researchers should not ignore societal culture in decisions surrounding the selection and implementation of management efforts and conditions that shape performance practice in organizations. This study contributes by providing a framework and evidence showing how culture’s effects on performance occur.

Key words:

• Performance
• Asia
• culture
• public management

Notes

¹ The five dimensions are: power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation. To these, indulgence has been added a sixth dimension.

² The nine dimensions are: Performance Orientation, Uncertainty Avoidance, Humane Orientation, Institutional Collectivism, In-Group Collectivism, Assertiveness, Gender Egalitarianism, Future Orientation, and Power Distance.

³ This section title is taken from Hofstede’s (2001) book.

⁴ House’s study is consistent with this and reports in many Asian countries less charismatic-based (inspiring) leadership, greater orientations towards group behaviour, and more efforts to ensure the safety and security of individuals and their groups (House 2004).

⁵ Additionally, culture also shapes organizational policies and priorities. In recent times, changing organizational policies and practices regarding diversity reflect not only legal mandates, but also changing societal values and norms.

⁶ Leaders and supervisors who ignore general, social norms do so at considerable risk, as people are expected to behave in generally accepted ways. The approach here is consistent with Mills and Mills (2000) who urge researchers of organizational culture to move beyond seeing culture as a mere metaphor of organizational realities and to understand culture from the perspective of those factors which generate and maintain organizational processes that construct the feelings of shared meaning (Cassar and Bezzina 2005). Bluedorn (2000)  argues that understanding organizational culture and hence proposing changes entails the appreciation of the time factor; ‘the attempt to move an organization’s culture, even a department’s culture, to a new value or belief is one of the greatest challenges facing any manager, and the temporal dimensions of culture may be the hardest to change of all, because they are some of any culture’s most fundamental values and beliefs’ (p. 127).

⁷ See: http://www.geert-hofstede.com/

⁸ The five key relations in Confucianism that involve obedience are those between ruler and subject; father and son; husband and wife; oldest son and younger brothers; and among friends, elders, and juniors. Bosses are seen as rulers in this scheme. Knowing one’s place is key and being obedient to superiors are cornerstone concepts, but these relations also require more, such as benevolence, loyalty, and righteousness, for example.

⁹ For space limitations, we do not discuss these cultures here as they are central to this study’s purpose. Some differences are that Southeast Asia cultures are given to less work ethic, and India is given to large bureaucracies that, anecdotally, are among the least productive and most corrupt among the countries under study (e.g., see Transparency International, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index).

¹⁰ See also a recent symposium on ‘HRM in Asia-Pacific’ (Review of Public Personnel Administration, 3(2), June 2013). Additionally, surveys were implemented in Chile, Brazil, Texas, Australia, and Philippines. Some of these may be non-comparable samples and are therefore not included here.

¹¹ Here, we report values for East Asia, which is the main focus of the analysis. The alpha values of this index for other regions/countries are: Malaysia (.80), India (.78), and United States (.73). The eigenvalue for the entire data is 2.81

¹² Factor loadings for work ethics are .71, .75, and .67; for followership .66, .75, .71, and .72; and for group belonging .67, .74, and .73, respectively, in the order as shown in Table 3. An issue is a statistical support for unidimensionality. However, not all indexes need to claim that they are unidimensional; the literature is replete with examples of additive indexes that are justified on conceptual, non-statistical grounds only (e.g., Poister and Streib 2005). Also, measures with few items seldom have good inter-item reliability (alpha), which matter authors sometimes ignore altogether, such as when there are only three or four survey items (e.g., Askim and Hanssen 2008) as is the case here, or two survey items (e.g., Bozeman and Kingley 1998), or when involving multiple countries (e.g., Dahlstrom et al. 2012). See also Bauer et al. (1994); Cortina (1993); Schmitt (1996).

¹³ Using data of only managers and supervisors, these are lower estimates. Using the entire data set, the tau-c values are .252, –1.76, and .274, respectively.

¹⁴ Not only are these orientations consistent with widely held Confucian values and practices in East Asia, there are also no known public laws, rules, or workplace regulations that are unique to East Asia that might explain these differences.

¹⁵ However, these differences diminish among those who strongly agree, agree, or somewhat agree: 90.6 per cent versus 87.67 per cent.

¹⁶ These differences may reflect age differences across the countries or East Asian preferences for establishing ‘harmonious relations’ rather than ‘peace by avoidance’.

¹⁷ East Asian respondents report low, medium, and high levels of followership to be: 44.9, 37.5, and 17.7 per cent, respectively, as compared to US respondents: 87.7, 9.4, and 2.9 per cent. East Asian respondents report low, medium, and high levels of group belonging to be: 22.3, 43.0, and 34.6 per cent, respectively, as compared to US respondents: 28.0, 33.0, and 39.1 per cent. East Asian respondents report low, medium, and high levels of work ethic to be: 26.8, 39.9, and 33.3 per cent, respectively, as compared to US respondents: 33.4, 45.6, and 20.9 per cent.

¹⁸ We use conventional path analysis for these calculations. The data from this exploratory study do not allow for constructing SEM models. We use Table 6 only for the purpose of calculating estimated total effects, not for suggesting that this is a valid representation of culture’s many effects.

¹⁹ The only differences are that the indicator of work ethic is significant in the subsample of East Asia for performance practices and the indicator variable of group belonging is not.