comparative value priorities of chinese and new zealand

determine how work values are perceived in those nations by the prevailing cultural
value emphases. An emphasis on extrinsic work values is hypothesised to be compatible
with Embeddedness and Hierarchy culture values and to conflict with Intellectual
Autonomy values. The location of the samples indicate that both the Chinese teacher
and student samples gave relatively strong emphasis to Embeddedness and Hierarchy
values and weak emphasis to Intellectual Autonomy values, whereas the New Zealand
samples showed the opposite cultural value emphases. If cultural values are associated
with and influence individual work values, then the pursuit of extrinsic work values is
more common, and their use as motivators probably more effective, e.g., in China than
in New Zealand.
SUMMARY: CULTURE
How many cultural value dimensions are needed to capture the broad cultural value
differences amongst societies? Schwartz (2004) believes that it is too early in our
development of knowledge to answer this question definitively, but he believes as few
as three or four bi-polar dimensions, each comprising a pair of nearly opposing
orientations, may suffice.
Schwartz (2004, amongst other works) believes the critical value dimensions are
unlikely to be orthogonal. They evolve as preferences for resolving basic issues in
managing life in society. It is not logical that preferences for resolving one issue will not
become intertwined with preferences for resolving other issues. Cultures that encourage
Autonomy in individual/group relations are unlikely to prefer hierarchy for managing
human interdependence in business organisations. Though not opposites, Autonomy and
hierarchy rarely appear together because they indicate conflicting views of human
nature. Schwartz believes deriving orthogonal dimensions from data can lead to results
that ignore tendencies toward consistency and coherence across values in national
cultures.
Analyses of empirical and conceptual relations amongst the various cultural value
dimensions and orientations suggest that it is useful to discriminate at least the
following:
119