An Examination of Country and Culture-Based Differences in Compensation Practices
- PDF / 228,125 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 426 x 765 pts Page_size
- 95 Downloads / 145 Views
Palgrave Macmillan Journals is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to Journal of International Business Studies ® www.jstor.org
668 JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONALBUSINESS STUDIES, FOURTH QUARTER1990
form of area studies,which take threedistincttypes: (1) studiesproduced by researchers within the country under observation (i.e., British researcherswriting on British compensation:White [1985];Bowey and Thorpe[1986]),(2) studiesby foreignersobservingthe compensationpractices of a country of interest(i.e., AmericanworkersstudyingJapanese compensationpractices:Hashimoto& Raisian[1985]),and (3) compensation informationcontainedwithin area studies that are focused on some other phenomena(Thng[1981];Nelson & Reeder[1985]).(Ideally,a fourth type of internationalpay researchshould also be available:true crossnational researchwith compensationpracticesas the foci of interest.) These studies reveala wide range of compensationpracticesin different countrieswithinthe sameindustries.Todate,however,virtuallyno comparativecross-nationalacademicresearchhas focusedon pay practices,nor on workers'attitudestowardtheir pay, and it is to this need that this study is addressed. The purposeof this studyis twofold:First,to determineif differencesexist betweenculturesand countriesin the wayemployeesarecompensated,and second, to determineif the culturalclustermodel describedby Ronenand Shenkar[1985]is predictivewhenappliedto compensationpractices.Determining if differencesin pay policies are country-basedor culture-based of pay practiceson phenomenawill provideinsightinto the generalizability a globalbasis. Further,this studywill suggestapplicationsto compensation practicesof the Ronen and Shenkar[1985]model, which was designedto segment countries into culturallyrelatedgroups for purposes of understandingworkvaluesand the relationshipof cultureto those values.A key assumptionbehind this model is that work attitudesimilaritiestranscend nationalboundariesand are more properlyevaluatedat the culturallevel. Althoughthe dataset availablefor this cross-nationalcomparisonis somewhat rudimentary(in that it does not allow for substantialdisaggregation of the pay data), this study is a first step in analyzingthe differencesin cross-culturalcompensationpractices. LITERATURE REVIEW
Hartigan[1975]contendedthat clusteringallowsfor a morethoroughunderfactorsthat areassociatedwith differstandingof the macro-environmental ences in actions and values, in this case internationaldifferencesin pay practicesand work values. Subtle differencesthat might go unnoticedat the country level become more apparentwhen it is shown that an entire region on the map may share some common characteristic[Kraut1975; Ronen& Kraut1977]. Hartigan[1975]also cited the utility of clustering, in that it allowsfor generalizationsto be madeaboutunstudiedgroupsthat wouldbe considereda partof a particularcluster.Sincecompensationpractices are stronglyrelatedto workvaluesand to othermacro-environmental phenomena,it would seem appropriateto consider culture as havi
Data Loading...
