Suchergebnisse

This theory-based study tests the interactive impacts of the demands of thermal climate and wealth resources on variations in privileged culture represented by mental health, personal freedom, and political democracy. Multiple regression analysis of aggregated survey data covering 106 countries shows that cultures vary from minimally privileged in poor countries with demanding climates (e.g., Azerbaijan and Belarus) to maximally privileged in rich countries with demanding climates (e.g., Canada and Finland). In between those extremes, moderate degrees of privileged culture prevail in poor and rich countries with undemanding climates (e.g., Colombia and Singapore). Rival explanations and competing predictors, including degrees of agrarianism versus capitalism, latitude and longitude, and parasitic disease burden, could not account for these findings in support of the burgeoning climato-economic theory of culture.

This theory-based study tests the interactive impacts of the demands of thermal climate and wealth resources on variations in privileged culture represented by mental health, personal freedom, and political democracy. Multiple regression analysis of aggregated survey data covering 106 countries shows that cultures vary from minimally privileged in poor countries with demanding climates (e.g. Azerbaijan and Belarus) to maximally privileged in rich countries with demanding climates (e.g. Canada and Finland). In between those extremes, moderate degrees of privileged culture prevail in poor and rich countries with undemanding climates (e.g. Colombia and Singapore). Rival explanations and competing predictors, including degrees of agrarianism versus capitalism, latitude and longitude, and parasitic disease burdens, could not account for these findings in support of the burgeoning climato-economic theory of culture.

Places of residence have multiple, yet largely unintegrated, cultural characteristics. Here I make a distinction between human environments that offer demanding winters or summers together with collective poverty (threatening ecologies), undemanding temperate climates irrespective of income per head (comforting ecologies), and demanding winters or summers together with collective wealth (challenging ecologies). After reviewing prior research into cultural characteristics under these environmental conditions, I am reporting a climato-economic study of we/they discrimination across 95 nations. Together, these investigations show that threatening ecologies are prone to mental ill-being, bureaucratic organizing, press repression, autocratic politics, survival goals, societal collectivism and relatively strong we/they discrimination. By contrast, challenging ecologies are prone to mental well-being, organic organizing, press freedom, democratic politics, self-expression goals, societal individualism and relatively weak we/they discrimination. In between these extremes, comforting ecologies are prone to intermediate cultural realities.

Climato-economic theorizing explains why and how inhabitants adapt culturally to their habitat. In demandingly cold or hot habitats with poor monetary resources, inhabitants create threat appraisals, survival goals, ingroup agency, and autocracy, converging into a cultural threat syndrome. In demandingly cold or hot habitats with rich monetary resources, inhabitants create challenge appraisals, self-expression goals, individual agency, and democracy, converging into a cultural challenge syndrome. In between, in undemandingly temperate climates, inhabitants create comfort appraisals, easygoing goals, convenient agency, and laissez-faire outcomes, converging into a cultural comfort syndrome. This review culminates with a regression equation that accounts for 56% of the variation in threat-based versus challenge-based cultural syndromes across 129 countries. On the basis of that regression equation and data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a plan is sketched to forecast worldwide changes in culture.

This report of an intervention in a mental health care institution illustrates that exchanging distorted group images is an effective strategy for improving situations of intergroup conflict. The intervention is especially effective if the group images are not attacked, which tends to reinforce rather than mitigate them, but if they are undermined in a nondirective way instead The implementation of this nondirective process intervention is discussed in depth to demonstrate how the original intervention technique is enriched in several respects.

Sternberg and his co‐workers developed a new taxonomy of conflict management styles that ignores an earlier, related model proposed by Blake and Mouton, Thomas, and Rahim. Following a critical review of Sternberg's taxonomy, the present paper presents a reanalysis of some of Sternberg's data that attempts to integrate the two taxonomies. The results confirm Thomas's identification of integrative and distributive dimensions underlying the typology of conflict styles. Sternberg's style of involving outsiders is interpreted as a "Pyrrhic victory," which loads low on the integrative dimension and high on the distributive dimension. The study is interpreted as providing evidence for the need to replace the concept of conflict style as a specific form of behavioral tendency by treating style as a broad pattern of behavioral tendencies.

Siding in a dyadic conflict is important because it precipitates escalation. Nevertheless, little is known about how and why a nonprofessional outsider (P) reacts when a conflict party puts him under pressure to take sides. Coalition and role conflict theories suggest four behavior alternatives (taking sides, compromise, avoidance, and conflict resolution) and two behavior determinants: the sanction power and the legitimate power each of the conflict parties exerts over P. This article delineates the relationships among these variables (power hypothesis), and introduces the further assumptions that P will gather information before he selects one of the four behavior alternatives (process hypothesis) and that escalating siding behavior will be his most frequent reaction (escalation hypothesis). In a secondary analysis of cross-sectional survey data on behavior in role conflict situations, the power hypothesis and the escalation hypothesis are confirmed. Finally, the theoretical and practical significance of the theory are discussed.

AbstractThe impact of the psychological states of the negotiators, the social conditions of negotiations, and the behavior of negotiators on the outcomes of negotiations differs from country to country. Various suboptimal, individual-level, and country-level solutions have been suggested to predict and explain such cross-national variations. Drawing inspiration from a series of cross-cultural studies on job satisfaction and motives for volunteer work that successfully employed multilevel modeling, we propose a multilevel research approach to more accurately examine the generalizability of negotiation models across countries.

The common part of leadership culture in a country's organizations is conceptualized here as an adaptation to the non-cultural environment. This society-level study shows that middle managers from 61 societies in 58 countries hold different views on destructive versus constructive leadership profiles depending on the harshness of thermal climate and the degree of collective wealth. The cognitive contrast between more destructive autocratic and self-protective leadership components and more constructive team-oriented and charismatic leadership components is construed as small in harsh/poor environments (e.g. China, Kazakhstan), moderate in temperate climates irrespective of collective wealth (e.g. New Zealand, Zambia), and large in harsh/rich environments (e.g. Canada, Finland). These society-level construals of leadership shed new light on the cross cultural generalizability of theories of people-oriented and task-oriented leadership. In addition, they uncover and clarify the inhibition of managers in richer countries with more demanding climates to complement prosocial with antisocial behavior toward subordinates when appropriate.

The aim of this study was to identify some structural and cultural barriers to employees' trust in management. Multilevel analyses of data from 160,577 employees in 46 countries suggested that job formalization is negatively associated with trust in management, especially in individualistic countries, and that this relationship is mediated by less open employee–management communication. By contrast, in collectivistic countries no strong link was found between job formalization and both trust and open communication.

Prior studies examined cross-national differences in the links between organizational characteristics and workers' attitudes and behaviors using a nation-as-a-moderator analytical model. We point out four major methodological problems of testing the nation-as-a-moderator model at individual level. Based on two series of cross-national studies that successfully employed multilevel modeling, we propose a cross-level nation-as-amoderator model to resolve the methodological problems. We further contend that the cross-level approach may also offer an alternative theoretical perspective for researchers to map and explain cross-national variation in organizational behaviors.

A hidden issue is whether the more de‐escalatory behavior of cooperatively‐motivated compared to competitively‐motivated conflict parties is the result of less concern for one's own goals, more concern for the other's goals, or both. A scenario study and a simulation experiment among undergraduate students confirmed the hypothesis that the difference in other‐concern is the critical explanator. The stronger other‐concern of cooperatively‐motivated compared to competitively motivated parties fostered more accommodating, more problem solving, more compromising, and less forcing, resulting in more de‐escalation or less escalation.