Relational Job Design Across Cultures: An Exploration of Organizational Commitment and Job Satisfaction
Open Access
- Author:
- Stanton, Brian Joseph
- Area of Honors:
- Management
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Stephen Erik Humphrey, Thesis Supervisor
Stephen Erik Humphrey, Thesis Supervisor
James Alan Miles, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Relational Job Design
Culture
Job Satisfaction
Organizational Commitment - Abstract:
- The effect of culture on various management and job functions has been somewhat of an elusive concept to grasp for various experts on the matter. The first problem – how do you control for something as broad and multi-definitional as a culture? There is no clear consensus on how to apply and control for cultural factors when dealing with modern and past management theory. Michael Morris, Joel Podolny, and Billian Sullivan took a practical approach in “Cultural and Coworker Relations: Interpersonal Patterns in American, Chinese, German and Spanish Divisions of a Global Bank” (2008), focusing on the external social structures and coworker relationships to explain cross-cultural values. Morris et al write, “we propose that culture is carried out by the relationship patterns in which people are embedded…we really on egocentric network survey methodology to survey employees about their concrete relationships to particular coworkers” (517-518). Accordingly, there have been several other scholars, such as Ng, Sorensen and Kim (2009), and Hofstede (1983) that have written in accordance with this principle. There is some agreement that culture can usually be defined by examining cultural practices, social norms and relationship patterns. In the field of relational job design, there is a budding field of work, spearheaded by Adam Grant, which focuses on an analysis of the effect of social characteristics of jobs on work outcomes. Studies by Grant (2007) and Morgenson/Humphrey (2007) have supported the theory that work outcomes such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment are augmented by social support. There is a blank space left for theorizing on the effect of social characteristics across cultures on job outcomes. For the purposes of this paper, a narrow focus on three outcomes of work – job satisfaction, job performance and organizational commitment – will be employed using a cross cultural lens. The relationship between job satisfaction and job performance is also explored. A theoretical look into the matter will explore several hypotheses that individuals in certain cultures, such as those with a larger focus on social support, should experience higher levels of job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Four countries (the same four used by Morris and colleagues in their 2008 study) will be used for the hypotheses – America, China, Germany and Spain.