Masters Thesis

The impact of culture on attitudes towards upward appraisals

The increasing amount of cultural diversity in the United States workforce as well as the continued globalization of multi-national companies have led to an increased focus on how Western-based human resource practices impact employees from different cultural backgrounds. One such practice, Multi-Source Feedback Systems (MSFS), may be particularly sensitive to cultural differences due to the fact that it is designed to collect feedback for the participant across different levels of the company hierarchy. Power distance, which is the degree to which individuals recognize and accept that there is a social hierarchy, can cause employees to submit to the same hierarchies in their organizations and view the concept of providing feedback to their superiors as inappropriate. In this study, we attempted to examine whether or not peoples' cultural value of power distance affected how uncomfortable they were in providing feedback for their superiors (upward feedback). The results supported our hypothesis that participants' cultural value of power distance was positively correlated with discomfort when they were asked to provide upward feedback. The results from this study fill a gap in the existing literature and further suggest that globalization of practices may need to be more sensitive of cultural differences.

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