The Effect of Cultural Values on Participants’ Perception of Employees Involved in Workplace Romance
Previous research has found that people within generally collectivist and individualist cultures vary in their perceptions of certain situations, including workplace situations. Knowledge of the effects of employees’ cultural values has great implications on how organizational leadership manages teams and projects or creates policy. This study tested the hypothesis that the negative perception of employees involved in workplace romance, via perceived trustworthiness and conscientiousness, would be greater in individuals more influenced by collectivist cultural values rather than individualist ones. Participants were asked questions to determine their beliefs towards collectivist and individualist values and were given two scenarios. The first scenario was without workplace romance and the second with workplace romance. They were then asked to score employee conscientiousness and trustworthiness for each. Results did not indicate a significant difference in scores between participants who believed in more collectivist rather than individualist values, so our hypothesis was not supported, but did indicate a significant relationship between cultural values and the general perception of employees, and indicated relationships between ethnicity, education, and cultural values. These results suggest that organizational leadership can manage workplace romance similarly across employees with varying cultural values.