Date of Award

8-1-2011

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Organizational Unit

Morgridge College of Education

First Advisor

Patrick Sherry, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Kathy Green

Third Advisor

Ruth Chao

Keywords

Cross-border organizations, Cross-cultural organizations, Degree of operational integration, Multinational organizations, Multinational work teams, Work values

Abstract

The present study gathered data from 147 employees in two U.S. headquartered multinational manufacturing companies. Participants responded to questions about their work-related values, perceptions of the productivity of their work teams, and the degree of operational integration between firms‟ foreign affiliate offices and their U.S. based headquarters. Additionally, analyses were conducted to assess the relationship between team productivity and psychic distance, which is a measure of country-level cultural differences. Work values were assessed using The Values Scale (Neville & Super, 1989), perceptions of team productivity were assessed used an instrument by Kirkman and Rosen (1999), degree of operational integration was measured using a set of items developed by Slangen (2006), and psychic distance was assessed using a scale created by Hakanson and Ambos (2010). As expected, work values were found to be different between a firm‟s headquarters and a foreign office and work values predicted perceptions of team productivity when controlling for the age of the team. Psychic distance was found to predict team productivity when team age was controlled, and a more highly integrated degree of operational integration was found to relate to perceived productivity. Contrary to expectation, a significant interaction was not found to exist between work values, degree of integration, and psychic distance. However, a significant interaction was found between psychic distance and work values. Implications of the findings, limitation of the data, and directions for future research are also presented.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Kelly C. Kinnebrew

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

146 p.

Discipline

Business, Psychology, International relations

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