Counterproductive Work Behavior
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likely to fuel up shared accomplishment and concerns for social well-being, we predict that
Chinese would endorse higher values on OCB than North Americans.
Cross-cultural research on human resource management practices provides support for
both the convergence and divergence perspectives. Zhou and Martocchio (2001) compared
Chinese and American managers' compensation award decisions using a policy-capturing
approach. They found that in comparison with the American managers, the Chinese managers
tended to put less emphasis on work performance and more emphasis on the personal needs of
the employees when making bonus decisions and on relationship with managers and coworkers
when making non-monetary decisions. These results are broadly supportive of the collectivist
orientation of the Chinese culture and of the divergence perspective. However, using a sample of
employees from mainland China, Chen (1995) found that Chinese respondents demonstrated
preferences for individual-based reward allocation, similar to North American counterparts.
The present study attempts to integrate the perspectives of convergence and divergence
theorists in exploring the emphasis managers' place on task performance, OCB, and CWB when
rating overall job performance. Taking a convergence perspective, we predict that Chinese and
Canadian managers will share a tendency to give significant weights to all three groups of
behaviors in evaluating their subordinate's performance. Taking from the divergence perspective,
we predict that Chinese managers will endorse higher values, than Canadian managers, to OCB
in rating of overall performance.
Hypothesis 1: Chinese and Canadian managers will independently give significant weight
to task performance in ratings of overall performance.
Hypothesis 2: Chinese and Canadian managers will independently give significant
weight to organizational citizenship behaviour in ratings of overall performance.