scholarly journals Moral concerns through the lens of culture: Responding to intergroup-level authority decisions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karolina Urbanska ◽  
Sam Pehrson ◽  
Miriam Park

We consider cultural differences in how moral concerns can shape responses to intergroup- level authority decisions – that is, decisions that allocate outcomes between different groups. We hypothesised that at the individual level, moral foundations may predict how people respond to authority decisions that either favour or disfavour their group, and that this relationship would be different depending on culture. The extent to which those values lead to the expected responses to authority decisions was investigated in two samples of students in Northern Ireland and Malaysia (N = 318). Participants read about two government decisions to distribute prestigious internships between their own and another university (in favouring or disfavouring ratios) and responded to scales measuring their decision acceptance and perceptions of fairness. We found that moral concern for authority - but not loyalty or fairness - predicted how students responded to authority decisions. However, cultural context moderated this effect. For Malaysian students, higher moral concern for authority predicted less preference for the pro-ingroup authority decision, whereas for the Northern Irish sample, the reverse was true. Thus, we demonstrate that the understanding of values is culture-specific and can translate to the opposing behaviours, depending on the context.

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dong Mai Tran ◽  
Wayne Fallon ◽  
Margaret H. Vickers

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore multiple stakeholders’ perceptions of leadership in Vietnamese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents findings from semi-structured interviews that were conducted in Vietnam, with seven different stakeholders who had varying understandings of Vietnamese business leadership within the Vietnamese business context. All interviews were transcribed, then translated into English, and thematic analysis of the interview data undertaken. Findings – The paper suggests that there was a significant variation in Vietnamese leadership perceptions when compared to Western leadership practices, especially when considering the perceptions of those stakeholders with regard to business leadership in the Vietnamese collectivist cultural context. The themes presented include: SOE decision making and responsibility; SOE promotions and appointments; and SOE performance. Research limitations/implications – In the absence of studies of leadership in Vietnamese SOEs, and leadership studies in the Vietnamese culture in general, this research was deliberately exploratory and qualitative. Future mixed methods or quantitative studies are recommended to offer more generalizable conclusions. Practical implications – Implications are discussed that point to leadership changes in Vietnamese organizations, and at the individual level, to assist the Vietnamese government, SOEs, and future leaders. Recommendations are also made that are intended to assist foreign business investors and multinational companies operating in Vietnam, now and in the future, to improve their leadership capacity within this context. Social implications – Vietnam is a country in social and economic transition. Understanding the leadership practices and perceptions, especially how that might differ from leadership in Western nations, is critical for the success of organizations in Vietnam and, in turn, for the economic and social prosperity of the Vietnamese people. Originality/value – The paper contributes perceptions of business leadership in Vietnamese SOEs that have not previously been explored and should be, especially given this critical time of economic and social transition for the Vietnamese nation and economy.


Author(s):  
M. Kyle Matsuba ◽  
Tobias Krettenauer ◽  
Michael W. Pratt

Global warming has become an existential concern for our own and the planet’s future. As developmental psychologists, the authors are interested in pro-environmental behavior at the individual level, believing that the societal changes needed to address this issue require changes at the individual level. In this chapter, the authors frame environmental issues as moral issues to the extent that how people think about, react to, and interact in the environment reflect moral values such as caring. Consequently, the authors explore how people’s moral attitudes, thinking, emotions, and behavior around environmental issues form and change over the course of development. They also investigate how developing experiences with the natural environment can influence its importance to the self and in identity formation. Finally, the authors consider that cultural context matters; that attitudes and behaviors toward the environment and how they develop depend on the culture in which we are raised and that what we currently know about the development of environmentalism in not likely to extend much beyond mainstream cultures in Western, industrialized countries.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (7) ◽  
pp. 2951-2969 ◽  
Author(s):  
IpKin Anthony Wong ◽  
Hoi In Veronica Fong ◽  
Aliana Man Wai Leong ◽  
Jacky Xi Li

Purpose The scant literature on MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions) tourists’ gambling behavior calls for a need to explore how their decision to gamble (hereafter, “gambling decision”) may unfold. Consequently, several questions germane to the inter-relationships among event tourists’ characteristics, casinos attributes, and gambling behaviors remain largely unaddressed. This paper aims to address the void in the literature by investigating event participants’ gambling decision. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected based on two samples, and a multilevel design was used to test the proposed model. Demographic and event-related participant characteristics were examined as antecedents of gambling decision at the individual level. Event goers’ accommodation characteristics such as brand equity and type of hotel were explored as cross-level effects on the individual-level factors and relationships. Findings Results of the study illustrate a joint influence – in terms of both direct and moderating effects – of individual-level and organizational-level characteristics on gambling decision. In particular, brand equity moderates the relationships leading from demographic and event-related characteristics to gambling decision. Practical implications The inter-relationships among events, accommodations and casinos present an opportunity for hospitality practitioners to better integrate these three services in a more coherent experiential offering for the ever-demanding MICE attendees. Findings also help practitioners to justify their targeting strategy. Originality/value The proposed framework presents the dynamic nature of the hospitality industry in which the event, hotel and casino sectors are interdependent, a picture hitherto prevented by the single-level oriented nature of gambling and hospitality research which largely focuses on the individual perspective. Given the dynamic nature of the hospitality industry, the findings elucidate a complex interdependency of customer needs.


Author(s):  
Marlene Mauk

This chapter develops an explanatory model of regime support applicable to both democracies and autocracies. The explanatory model includes both individual- and system-level determinants and explicates how these interact in shaping regime support. On the individual-level, it integrates culturalist and institutionalist explanations of support to arrive at five central sources of regime support: political value orientations, societal value orientations, incumbent support, democratic performance evaluations, and systemic performance evaluations. On the system level, it draws on social psychological theories of attitude formation and identifies four sources of regime support: macro-cultural context, macro-political context, actual systemic performance, and level of socioeconomic modernization. Recurring to the fundamental differences between democracies and autocracies, the explanatory model expects the individual-level processes forming regime support to be universal across regime types, but effects of system-level sources of regime support to vary between democracies and autocracies, due to indoctrination and propaganda distorting the attitude-formation process in autocracies.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zandra M. Zweber ◽  
Robert A. Henning ◽  
Vicki J. Magley ◽  
Pouran Faghri

One potential way that healthy organizations can impact employee health is by promoting a climate for health within the organization. Using a definition of health climate that includes support for health from multiple levels within the organization, this study examines whether all three facets of health climate—the workgroup, supervisor, and organization—work together to contribute to employee well-being. Two samples are used in this study to examine health climate at the individual level and group level in order to provide a clearer picture of the impact of the three health climate facets.k-means cluster analysis was used on each sample to determine groups of individuals based on their levels of the three health climate facets. A discriminant function analysis was then run on each sample to determine if clusters differed on a function of employee well-being variables. Results provide evidence that having strength in all three of the facets is the most beneficial in terms of employee well-being at work. Findings from this study suggest that organizations must consider how health is treated within workgroups, how supervisors support employee health, and what the organization does to support employee health when promoting employee health.


2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Marte Pensgaard ◽  
Marit Sorensen

Our purpose is to propose a model of “Empowerment through the sport context” to guide psychosocial research in disability sport. We discuss the concept of empowerment in relation to sport for individuals with disabilities. Expanding upon the work of Hutzler (1990), we include three levels of empowerment (societal, group, and individual level) in our approach. Important moderators are age of onset of disability, gender, and type of disability. Important mediators are (a) at the individual level, achievement goals, identity, and self-efficacy; (b) at the group level, motivational climate, group identity, and collective efficacy; and finally, (c) at the societal level, the cultural context and political efficacy. Several methodological considerations are discussed, and various solutions are suggested. We also discuss the critiques that have emerged in relation to the use of the empowerment concept.


2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 1027-1034 ◽  
Author(s):  
AM Gallagher ◽  
PJ Robson ◽  
MBE Livingstone ◽  
GW Cran ◽  
JJ Strain ◽  
...  

AbstractObjectiveTo assess tracking of energy and nutrient intakes between adolescence and young adulthood.DesignLongitudinal study of a random sample of adolescents (aged 15 years at baseline). The extent of tracking of dietary intakes (assessed by diet history) was investigated using weighted kappa statistics (κ).SettingNorthern Ireland population survey.SubjectsAdolescents who participated in the Young Hearts Project, Northern Ireland at age 15 years, and subsequently at young adulthood aged between 20 and 25 years (n = 245 males,n = 231 females).ResultsDespite overall increases in height and weight (bothP < 0.001), increases in body mass index in males (P < 0.001) and body fatness in females (P < 0.001), median reported intakes of energy (kJ kg− 1 day− 1), carbohydrate (g day− 1) and fat (g day− 1) decreased (allP < 0.001) over time. Expressed as nutrient densities (per MJ), diets at young adulthood were overall richer in thiamin, vitamin B6, total folate (allP < 0.001), vitamin C (P < 0.01) and vitamin D (P < 0.05). Whereas the nutrient density of the males' diets decreased over time for calcium (P < 0.05) and vitamin A (P < 0.001), iron and riboflavin densities increased in the females' diet (P < 0.001). Tracking of energy (MJ day− 1) and nutrient intakes (expressed per MJ day− 1) at the individual level was only poor to fair (all κ < 0.25), indicating substantial drift of subjects between the low, medium and high classes of intake with increasing age.ConclusionsThese data suggest that individual dietary patterns exhibited at 15 years of age are unlikely to be predictive of dietary intakes at young adulthood.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 854-861
Author(s):  
John Garry ◽  
James Tilley ◽  
Neil Matthews ◽  
Fernando Mendez ◽  
Jonathan Wheatley

Despite the global growth in the use of Voter Advice Applications (VAAs), which advise users on how similar their own policy views are to the policy positions of the political parties, there have been few field experiments that isolate the causal effects of VAA use on party support. Nor has there been much investigation of how VAAs may help to ameliorate ethnically based voting divisions by refocusing voter attention on other issues. This article draws on evidence from a field experiment in the deeply divided context of Northern Ireland. We find that at the individual level party preferences are somewhat more closely related to voter ideology after the provision of advice. Yet, at the aggregate level, we find no evidence that advice leads to weaker ethno-national structuring of party support. These results suggest that while receiving advice from VAAs has some impact on users’ party preferences, there is no observable overall impact on support levels for the ethno-national blocs in Northern Ireland.


2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chongzeng Bi ◽  
Oscar Ybarra ◽  
Yufang Zhao

Recent research investigating self-judgment has shown that people are more likely to base their evaluations of self on agency-related traits than communion-related traits. In the present research, we tested the hypothesis that agency-related traits dominate self-evaluation by expanding the purview of the fundamental dimensions to consider characteristics typically studied in the gender-role literature, but that nevertheless should be related to agency and communion. Further, we carried out these tests on two samples from China, a cultural context that, relative to many Western countries, emphasizes the interpersonal or communion dimension. Despite the differences in traits used and cultural samples studied, the findings generally supported the agency dominates self-esteem perspective, albeit with some additional findings in Study 2. The findings are discussed with regard to the influence of social norms and the types of inferences people are able to draw about themselves given such norms.


2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 183-198
Author(s):  
Wiktor Soral ◽  
Mirosław Kofta

Abstract. The importance of various trait dimensions explaining positive global self-esteem has been the subject of numerous studies. While some have provided support for the importance of agency, others have highlighted the importance of communion. This discrepancy can be explained, if one takes into account that people define and value their self both in individual and in collective terms. Two studies ( N = 367 and N = 263) examined the extent to which competence (an aspect of agency), morality, and sociability (the aspects of communion) promote high self-esteem at the individual and the collective level. In both studies, competence was the strongest predictor of self-esteem at the individual level, whereas morality was the strongest predictor of self-esteem at the collective level.


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