Cross-cultural organizational psychology

1. Cross-cultural organizational psychology Alin GavreliucWest University of TimișoaraFaculty of Sociology and Psychology Department of Psychology ------------------------------------------------------------------

3. THE main topics • Autarchic individualism and social axioms in the Western part of Romania • Transgenerational transfer of values and attitudes in post-communist Romania • Conceptualization of social autism as a psycho-social degenerative syndrome • Identity motives in the cultural context – the distinctiveness motives

4. Autarchic individualism and social axioms in the Western part of Romania • Study 1 - Diagnosis of Romanian organizations using the Hofstede model on a representative sample • “Quantitative “= regional representative sample (1058 subjects) for an active population in the Fifth Development Region in Romania (Timiş, Arad, Caraş-Severin and Hunedoara counties) • “Qualitative “ = through 7 focus-groups in organizations of different sizes (small, medium and multinational corporations). • Stake of research:Assessment of cultural specificity impact over value, attitudinal and behavioral patterns in the Romanian organizational environment. (The Fifth Development Region). • 1058 subjects (active populations, age: 18-65 / M, 18-60 / F). • 52 % man, 48 % women;Age average: 38,2 years.

5. Central concept • Cultural dimensions (Hofstede, 1980/2003) • 1. Power-distance:expresses the symbolic and operational inequality between superiors and subordinates in an organizations (PDhigh / low); • 2. Uncertainty Avoidance:fear of change and need of formal rules or availability concerning change(UAhigh / low); • 3.Individualism-collectivism:the distribution of personal attention, resources and commitment in task towards ones’ self or collectivity belonging, accent laid on self-achievement or on integration in social network perceived as relevant (I / C); • 4.Masculinity- feminity:focusing on personal objectives (income, organizational ascension and assertiveness), opposed to the interpersonal ones (friendly atmosphere, cordial cooperation with authority, tolerance) (M / F); • 5. Long / short term perspective:option for “now and here”, regressive reminisce / long term option in the achievement of personal in the organizational projects (LTP / STP).

6. Results obtained on VSM 94(conventional score)

7. Map of cultural dimensions – cross-cultural assessment Individualism index V ROM Power distance index

8. National cultures grouping depending on the UA and I-C specific scores • In the bottom rigth corner lies the Latin group (increased power-distance / high individualism) characterized briefly by G. Hofstede as dependent individualism. The opposite pattern, called independent collectivism is represented by Israel and Austria. The majority of the Third World countries is localized in the top right, described as a dependent collectivism. Most of “occidental” nations (post-industrialized) lie in the bottom left, expressing an independent individualism. • According to our researching results, the score on the Romanian sample position itself at the border between the area of dependent collectivism and that of dependent individualism.

9. Results comparative with other relevant researches / Romania / Balkans

10. Majority organizational portrait in the West of Romania achieved on the basis of cultural dimensions proposed by G. Hofstede • Retractility and formalism in the relations with the symbolic over-ordinate (great PD), • Moderate collectivism or, as it has been theorized as along the paper, a specific species of “autarchic individualism”, • Centering on relation to the detriment of organizational performance (strong F), • Fearing attitude towards change (high scores at UA), • Preponderant Short term orientation.

11. “Autarchic individualism” • Evidencing through turning to account the qualitative results from focus-groups investigations. • Typical formulations of subjects in the register of self-achievement = retractile and lack of commitment identitary description: • “anyway everything turns out as they want” (D. M., 34 years old); • “it’s useless to come up with ideas in the firm, as whatever I’d do, they don’t care” (A. R., 22 years old); • “I’d like to be left alone with what I am” (S. T., 48 years old); • “the best rule is how to avoid rules, because bosses, out of this, have made up the rule” (A. G., 37 years old).

12. Psychometric proprieties of VSM 94 (Western Romania sample) • At the limit of acceptability – 0.60 – in general, a modest internal reliability.The need of re-elaborating a new test is suggested by conjugating the ethic and emic methodological perspective.

13. Conclusions – study 1 • The dominant organizational culture in Romania expresses an axiological, attitudinal and behavioral pattern different from that of the majority national cultures that composed EU. • We can identify similarities in the scores obtained at the cultural dimensions between the research made in the Western part of Romania and those at national level, coordinated by Romanian and foreign specialists (I/C, M/F, UA, S/LTP), but can also identify significant differences (PD). • The managerial practices and the imported organizational interventions probes a modest operational efficiency, on condition they do not associate an emic perspective. • Cultural dimensions plays an important predictive role in generating of specific organizational behaviors, wherefrom the special importance of there knowledge and there turning to account.

14. Social axioms and relational patterns in the educational environment – Study 2 • The sample grouped 524 subjects (social sciences teachers for public educational institutions, 260 from universities and 264 from secondary schools) in the Western part of Romania (Timis, Caras-Severin, Arad and Hunedoara counties). Their age varied between 25-38 years (M = 33.4). • Instruments: • Social Axioms Survey – SAS 60, developed by Leung et al. (2002) • Self-monitorization Scale - (Snyder & Swann, 1974) • Machiavellianism – MACH IV Scale (Christie & Geis 1970/1999) • Self-determination Scale (Sheldon, Ryan, & Reis, 1996)

15. Statistically significant differences between independent samples

16. Study 2 - conclusions • lack of responsibility and cooperation, mistrust in the institutions and their significant members, fatalism, deficient social hope, public disengagement – all those characteristics of social cynicism – find their outcome in the relationships with “otherness”. • when significant statistical differences occur between the groups of subjects from the pre‑university and the university areas, it indicates an attitudinal pattern of disengagement, increasingly duplicitous and manipulative as they “advance” toward a socialized environment involving (quantitatively and qualitatively) “more education”, which is different from the results obtained in other research with a similar design (Kuo et al, 2006). • Despite appearances that would indicate that the university represents prestige, transparency, competence, what this study reveals in the end is an identity pattern of vulnerability (low self-determined, high fate control) and the need to compensate for this deficiency by illusory, duplicitous strategies (high social cynicism, Machiavellianism and self-monitoring).

17. Culture and personality in the Romanian educational field: relationships between social axioms and Hofstede’s model – Study 3 • 522 subjects: 253 professors from high-schools and 269 teachers from universities, from the humanistic and social sciences areas • The instruments applied were: • for cultural dimensions: the Social Axioms Survey (SAS) - which belongs to Michael Harris Bond and Kwok Leung; • the Values ​Survey Module 94 (VSM94) - drawn-up by Geert Hofstede, • for personal autonomy: the Self-Determination Scale (SDS) - of K. M Sheldon, R. M. Ryan and H. Rice; • Locus of Control Scale (LCS) - performed by J. Rotter • Self-esteem (RSE) - of Morris Rosenberg.

18. Comparative scores – Hofstede model

19. Cultural dimensions – portraits • The specific scores on this dimension have been closer to the global assessments of G. Hofstede (Hofstede, Hofstede, & Minkov, 2010), but in the results obtained on the Romanian samples (Spector, Cooper, Sanchez et al., 2001, Luca, 2005; Gavreliuc, 2011), the distance from power was significantly lower. • If past cited research evoke relational modernization in the sense of taking over an organizational and interpersonal hierarchical model on a Western pattern, the trend in our study illustrates an important return on the attitudinal level toward non-partnership patterns, characterized by aggression, mutual mistrust, frustration and disengagement.

20. Social Axioms model The score obtained on the most problematic dimension of the social axioms model (social cynicism = 3.30), the Romanian sample consisting of teachers, is placed in the vicinity of countries like those in the Far East (China - 3.03, Hong Kong - 3.13, India - 3.04) or the Islamic area (Pakistan - 3.29) (Bond & Leung 2010). Such a result shows striking duplicitous identity strategies which, beyond the rhetoric honourable interpersonal honest openness, works in an opportunistic and instrumental way (using it on the “other” as a means to achieve their own goals).

21. Social Axioms/hofstede model • Hofstede model: establishes that those working in the pre-university field are involved in hierarchical relations based more on partnership and cooperation than than those working in universities, with a statistically significantly lower score on distance toward power (t (520) =- 4.583, p <0.001). This result suggests an assimilation attitude pattern with a touch of the local educational environment: the more authoritarian and non-partnership they are, the more the subjects “climb” on the ladder of social prestige. • The features depicted above are strengthened by the statistically significantly higher scores in social cynicism for academic teachers, than for those of the pre-university environment (t (520) =- 2.213, p = 0.027), with an average very high for both samples anyway, significantly higher than the national cultures of most large-scale cross‑cultural research studies coordinated by Kwok Leung and Michael Harris Bond (2010).

22. Intergenerational comparison

23. Portrait of generational strata • Seen as a variable associated with interpersonal and institutional authoritarianism (Smith et al., 2005), pronounced high scores on power distance indicate the ordinary practices form school based on symbolic force, dogmatism and obedience, as generalized symptoms. Therefore, these kinds of practices become routine strategies in the hierarchical relationships in the Romanian educational environment. The difference between the youngest cohort (age 18-29) and the middle one (age 40-49) is more than 16 conventional points on the PD index, suggesting that the postcommunist period has consolidated the authoritarian patterns acquired in communism.

24. Social cynicism - comparison • Likewise, the most problematic social identity proved to be the younger one, because the main dimension of the social axioms model – social cynicism – is, statistically, significantly higher than the specific scores for the cohorts with consolidated experience in communism, especially than the cohorts of ages (40-49). • This outcome indicates the similar tendency as a previous research (Gavreliuc, Cimpean, & Gavreliuc, 2009), in which the Romanian younger social strata were more predisposed to an un-honest generalized way of thinking and acting in their interpersonal relationships, as a functional way of solving their own tasks. • The mere fact that social cynicism activates an interpersonal logic in an educational environment testifies to an assimilation of an implicit cognition pattern deeply rooted in the Romanian society, which relies on a lack of social capital, mainly represented by a deficient interpersonal and generalized trust (Sandu, 2003).

25. Transgenerational patterns of values and attitudes in post-communist Romania • The major area of my own research has focused over the last decade upon studying the process of the intergenerational transfer of values and attitudes in post-communist Romania, confronting the profiles of different generational strata with radical historical cleavages (Gavreliuc, 2008, 2011a, 2012a). The purpose of this longitudinal investigation was to examine whether a historical great rupture, like the Romanian Revolution of 1989, has changed the Romanian's values/attitudes or not.

26. PREVIOUS RESEACHES – STUDY 1 + 2 • The starting point consisted in a series of tendencies reported in two Romanian studies carried out between 2002–2003 and 2005–2006 (Gavreliuc, 2011). • The samples consisted of small, homogenous lots of subjects: teachers and students from the academic area (n = 179) (STUDY 1) as well as individuals from the private economic environment (n = 181) (STUDY 2), each sample being divided into three age groups (20, 35, and 50 years old). • Criteria of selection: • Subjects from the social stratumthat provides : • a consistent rate of social passivity and conservatorism (educational area); • an increasing rate of social and economical commitments (generational groups consist of subjects that are involved in private firms that center on production, from the Western part of Romania; • Comparison of the results obtained in an “economic private sector” subjects samplewith “educational sector” subjects sample = on most dimensions we have identified strong similarities. • Relevance for Cross-Cultural Psychology – specific generational profiles in terms of different cultural patterns (grouped in a particular patterns of social attitudes and value

27. Register of social subjectivity ………………………………….Personality as a psycho-social construct ………………… • VALUES • ATTITUDES (inferate variables) …………………………………………………………………………… • BEHAVIOURS (the level of collecting data about the personality of subjects)

28. Flexibility of values and (fundamental) social attitudes generated by socio-historical dynamics (Aronson, 1988; Loewenstein, 2007; McGuire, 1985; Perloff, 1993) Stability of values and (fundamental) social attitudes, despite of socio-historicaldynamics la longue durée(Braudel, 1958/1996) transgenerational remanent nature of social representations (Flament, 1995/1999) Concurrent theoretical frameworks

29. Hypothesis of attitudinal changing (changing of fundamental social attitudes) Hypothesisla longue durée(the persistence of fundamental social attitudes) Concurrent hypotheses

30. Dilemma • A specific socialization of subjects, due to a particular generational affiliation, associated with a distinct integration of a historical rupture experience… …will generate or not a major attitudinal change, reflected in an ensemble of relational personality traits?

31. Methodology: selecting the psychological dimensions • Quantitative methodology: • Psychological traits articulated through the assessment of (fundamental) social attitudes: • Independence-interdependence • Self-esteem • Internalism-externalism • Self-determination + • Value orientations structure • Qualitative methodology: • 28 Oral history interviews with the relevant persons from generation of “decretei”.

32. Psychological tests applied • Attitudinal register: • Independence-Interdependece Scale (Singelis, 1994) • Self-Esteem (Rosenberg, 1965) • Locus of Control (Rotter, 1964) • Self-Determination Scale (Sheldon, Ryan, Reis, 1996) • Awareness of Self • Perceived Choice • Axiological register: • Schwartz Values Survey(Schwartz, 2005) --> cultural level (value orientations)

33. Generational strata investigated – representative samples – Study 3 • The total sample consisted of 1481 subjects (end of 2009), being divided into three cohorts as follows. • G20: n = 472 with M = 26.34 years; • G35: n = 529 with M = 40.92 years, and • G50: n = 480 with M = 56.27 years. • Criteria for distribution of subjects: gender (½ M, ½ F), age (sub-scales+/- 2 years), residential area (urban high, urban medium, urban low, rural).

34. Intergenerational portraits – attitudinal register of analysis

35. Intergenerational portraits – Values register of analysis:any significant statistically differences between extreme cohorts (G50/G20)

36. Value portraits - Seven Cultural Value Orientations (Schwartz, 1999-2012) Abortion number • Conservatism The person is viewed as embedded in a collectivity, finding meaning in life largely through social relationships and identifying with the group. A cultural emphasis on maintenance of the status quo, propriety, and restraint of actions or inclinations that might disrupt the solidarity group or the traditional order. (social order, respect for tradition, family security, wisdom). • Intellectual Autonomy The person is an autonomous, bounded entity and finds meaning in his / her own uniqueness, seeking to express own internal attributes (preferences, traits, feelings) and is encouraged to do so. Intellectual Autonomy has a cultural emphasis on the desirability of individuals independently pursuing their own ideas and intellectual directions (curiosity, broadmindedness, creativity). • Affective Autonomy The person is an autonomous, bounded entity and finds meaning in his / her own uniqueness, seeking to express own internal attributes (preferences, traits, feelings) and is encouraged to do so. Affective Autonomy promote and protect the individual's independent pursuit of own affectively positive experience (pleasure, exciting life, varied life). • Hierarchy A hierarchical, differential allocation of fixed roles and of resources is the legitimate, desirable way to regulate interdependencies. People are socialized to comply with the obligations and rules and sanctioned if they do not. A cultural emphasis on the legitimacy of an unequal distribution of power, roles and resources (social power, authority, humility, wealth). • Egalitarianism Individuals are portrayed as moral equals, who share basic interests and who are socialized to transcend selfish interests, cooperate voluntarily with others, and show concern for everyone's welfare (equality, social justice, freedom, responsibility, honesty). People are socialized to as autonomous rather than interdependent because autonomous persons have no natural commitment to others (equality, social justice, freedom, responsibility, honesty). • Mastery Groups and individuals should master, control, and change the social and natural environment through assertive action in order to further personal or group interests. A cultural emphasis on getting ahead through active self-assertion (ambition, success, daring, competence). • Harmony The world is accepted as it is. Groups and individuals should fit harmoniously into the natural and social world, avoiding change and self-assertion to modify them. (unity with nature, protecting the environment, world of beauty). Birth number

37. Conclusions –confirming La longue durée” hypothesis • La longue durée” hypothesis was confirmed, the investigated social strata being characterized by a series of transgenerational patterns. • Thus, high interdependence, modest independence, high self-esteem, dominant externalism, and low self-determination were highlighted at the attitudinal level, whereas conservatism and low affective and intellectual autonomy values were noted at an axiological level. • Young people structure their implicitly assumed values and attitudes in the same way as the older generation, “their parents”, even if children these days sometimes condemn their parents for complicity and ‘shameful disposals’ in the communist times. Such narrative recurrences appear frequently in the oral interviews with individuals who are part of the young cohorts, despite the persistence of transgenerational assistentialistic and fatalistic attitudes (Gavreliuc, 2011).

38. The children of decree (“decrețeii”) • The middle generation (G35), often labelled as the generation of ‘decretei’ (‘decree’), is a distinct social stratum, one that may have internalized a dramatic social destiny: the generation who decisively contributed to the breakdown of the communist regime in Romania. • When drawing the portrait of this particular generation, its instability, ambivalence and vulnerability are evidently sustained (the most pronounced conservatism, favouring the most intense hierarchy, lower average scores for egalitarianism, but especially the most modest average scores for intellectual and affective autonomy across the three cohorts, suggesting internalization of generational insecurity). The results also indicate an achievement in terms of socio-historical traumas, with deep implications in people's identity profile, this vulnerability being reported in other similar studies regarding the ‘legacy of trauma’ (de Mendelssohn, 2008; Kellermann, 2001).

39. Conclusions • Most frequently, in the qualitative researches realized on “decretei” samples, their “major problem” has emerged : burden (sometime realized at the maturity period of their biography), through a hurtful anamnesis of an original rejection: • Recurrent discourse in the identitary narratives: “My parents didn’t desire me. Even if they have never told me that, and they have offered me all their love afterwards. I was so hurt. And all my later life has gone with my unending attempt to convince them that their sacrifice was worth it. It’s clear to me now that I didn’t always achieve that. And I’ll never know if it was good that I was born. I’m often followed by that crazy thought: if Ceausescu’s delirium had never existed, I would have never been born. Me and a lot of my peers from my generation are forming an phantomatic people, which does not find our place. And our great problem is that we were condemned to life.A life in which our world wasn't prepared to receive us.We got by as we could. But what will come of this country when it would be in our hands? We are just trying to regroup somewhere. I’m so scared that I’m going to crash again.And like me, my people would return to the darkness.” (M.P, 37 years old)

40. Imperative of every authentic psychotherapy = the need for any liberating social pedagogy: To overcome a trauma, we have to assume it, then integrate it. It is just in this way we can cut out the symptoms of social autism that have been disseminated in our society for more than half a century. Phantasmatic generation

41. Conceptualization of social autism as a psycho-social degenerative syndrome • Conducted in western Romania (Timisoara), but also in Bucharest, the studies have attempted to operationalize various species of pro-social behaviour (Levine, Norenzayan, & Philbrick, 2001) in order to assess interpersonal trust-building mechanisms in everyday contexts. • The explicit behavioural scenarios – which entail a non-ambiguous response, directly activated, as a result of a conscious deliberation of the engaged subject, but also certain implicit scenarios, in which the subject’s conduct could have suggested, intercessed by behaviour, the subject’s genuine option (Gavreliuc, 2011a, 2012b).

42. Behavioural scenarios and “how we know to be together” – explicit scenarios (1) • “the quick-hand passerby”- The behaviour of “the other” (the naive) was monitored only if the person asked for help was located on an approximately 10 m radium, within approximately 5 seconds as of the “loss”. Otherwise, the bill would be lifted up and returned to the “old accomplice” by another student accomplice. However, in order to avoid the “contamination” of the public scene, the scenario could not be reproduced in the same location, but within a radius of about 200 meters from the first “accident”, with the area gradually widening, and also not earlier than 10 minutes of the first “incident”, or more than 5 times consecutively in the same “session”. In this scenario, the call for help was obvious, explicit. To undertake the task, the accomplice randomly lost different bills (1, 10, 50, 100, 500 RON).

43. “the quick-hand passerby” (s1)

44. S1-narratives • Absurd explanations abounded with that contradictory behaviour of real engagement, such as “I was just waiting for you to look back, so I can return the money” (male, approximately 35 years old), or “I knew it’s only a worthless piece of paper, and I wanted to see how well it was copied” (male, 50 years old). • There was almost no trace of shame or guilt: the overwhelming majority described their gesture with cold implacability: “However, if I were the one losing it, the people around me would have done exactly what I did just now” (male, approximately 40 years old). • One subject ”concluded” by revealing that: “If something is given to me, I must grab it right away, because I always lose something, and I don't receive anything” (female, approximately 45 years old). • Snatching “the note” would symbolically convert the strategy of a person who, in a normal world, unremittingly gathers resources, through work, in a loyal completion climate, into a “winning” gesture. If “the note” was more or less “valuable”, then in almost half of the cases, normal people stole it, without feeling any responsibility for their duplicitary behaviour, and this in a city declared to be a model of autochthonous “civism”, and the only thing that mattered was “to cease the moment, because you don’t know what tomorrow brings” <male, approximately 35 years old>.

45. “the lucky driver” – S2 • S2 = has investigated the manner in which drivers who find themselves in a “difficult” situation, forced to take a main road from a secondary one, received the “kindness” of the “lucky ones” who had privileged access, being on the priority road. Although the intersections were similar (in terms of symbolic location in the city, and traffic volume), and the comparison was conducted during the same period of time of the day, the behaviours engaged by those followed by the young psycho-sociologists were very different in the two cities. • Thus, in one case out of twenty in Bucharest (5.07%) and in one case out of six in Timisoara (15.75%), the driver in need is given permission to enter the main road

46. ”the communitarian spit” – S3 • Such an indicator quantifies the frequency and expressivity of the gesture in question, carried out in a space shared with peers (such as those we meet while waiting for the tram or bus). • Carried out always during the same time interval and in the same type of areas in terms of “distance from the centre”, the indicator in question measured how many travellers pass through the stop and how many of them spit “without caring” about the others, within a time span of 30 minutes. It is interesting to notice not so much the percentage of those displaying such a disagreeable behaviour, but the manner in which they do it.

47. ”the communitarian spit” – S3 • Using a sui-generis observation grid, the operators therefore recorded, “if the citizen spits”, but, especially, “howthe citizen spits”. • Moreover, in each of these interaction contexts, the operators would help put together ad-hoc “expert groups” of 2-3 passers‑by, potential customers of the common means of transportation, who, following a short training conducted by psychosociologists and after assimilating the typology based on behavioural descriptors, agreed to enter this “experimental game”, and they had to spontaneously assess the conduct of “the spitters” at the stop.

48. Typology of spitters:A combination of manifested aggression, explicit (+) vs. implicit aggression, hidden (-) with /// focus on “the other” in the relational opening (+) vs. self-centeredness (-),

49. Narratives – “passive-aggressive” (45%) • …who <“spits mechanically, by routine, without even noticing it”>, which is also the most frequent (45% of the spitters). This public behaviour prevails in all the areas of the city, illustrating <a civically idiot, ethically slow and intellectually faded >. <Such a person will never greet you (unless they have a very specific interest to do it)>, <will not give you a hand when you suddenly and urgently need help>, <will not tell you a good word if they feel you are down>. Such a conduct suggests that their implicit retractility <is not the expression of a credo of contempt for their neighbour, because such a character is incapable of having credos>-, but, it’s simply that the unknown passer-by who involuntarily joins them in the public space is not part of their cognitive software, of their relational “flow chart”, <populated by only one character that matters, themselves> (which is why they are self-centered as well).

50. Narratives - explicit-aggressive (22%) • …who would even <“spit you between the eyes”>, accompanied by abundant and threatening gestures. <You will certainly recognize them among those who “easily push you in the tram”>, <who “listen loudly to manele” until the windows of your apartment tremble>, <who hustle your soul when they swear on holy things in front of your children> or who states, being “qualified” in such matters, after <a meaningful whistle>, <“yo, your wife’s hot!”>