comparative value priorities of chinese and new zealand

The major recent study of national and organisational culture is the Global Leadership
and Organisational Behaviour Effectiveness project, the GLOBE project. House,
Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman and Gupta (2004: 21) propose that although GLOBE
provides aggregate data only at the national level, the conceptual definitions of the
GLOBE cultural dimensions also apply to the organizational level; their dimensions can
measure the organizational culture inside the firm. That is, their proposition is that
organisational culture and national culture can be measured using the same dimensions.
Many of the reports of the set of twenty-five of the GLOBE individual country studies
in Chhokar, Brodbeck and House (2007) find significant differences between
organisations within countries. From a levels of analysis point of view, there is a
concern that relationships found at one level of analysis, e.g., nations, do not necessarily
apply at another, e.g., organisations, see Peterson and Castro (2006) and Smith (2006). I
am relating individual values to preferred behaviour of managerial leaders in business
organisations, so the organisation is a context, a contingency. As I am adopting the
divergence viewpoint, organisational behaviour is expected to be significantly
influenced by the culture in which the organisations operate, and the “people make the
organisation” context (Schneider, 1987: 1). They do so through their personal value
priorities and how these drive behaviour.
SCHWARTZ’ THEORY OF VALUE DIMENSIONS
Schwartz (1992, 1994), a social psychologist in Israel, developed a theory he believes to
be of potentially universal application for describing the content of human values. The
approach is based upon Rokeach’s (1973) work on values, and other theories and
research on value dimensions. Schwartz (1994) argued that individual and cultural
levels of analysis are independent, following the distinctions of the “level of analysis”
school in cross-cultural psychology (Leung, 1989; Fischer, 2009). Individual-level
dimensions reflect the psychological dynamics that individuals experience when acting
on their values in everyday life, whilst cultural-level dimensions reflect the solutions
that societies find to regulate human actions. At the cultural level of analysis, Schwartz
identified three bipolar dimensions: Conservatism - Autonomy, Hierarchy -
Egalitarianism, and Mastery - Harmony. As the major cultural model in this research
project, individual value dimensions will be discussed in depth below. Schwartz
employs ten types of values describing individuals within a single culture, defined as
motivational goals and identified as Power, Achievement, Hedonism, Stimulation, Self-
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