Work engagement from a cultural perspective
Culture and positive emotion
Because of the expanding global economy, researchers
in occupational health have begun to conduct crosscultural
research. As far as work engagement is concerned,
however, cross-cultural research has been
largely limited to western countries with relatively
small linguistic and cultural differences, such as Spain,
Portugal and The Netherlands [37]. Because the investigation
of work engagement in other non-western cultures,
such as Japan, still stand out, it may contribute
to our further understanding and to the generalizability
of the concept of work engagement across different
cultures. This is of special relevance because, previous
cross-cultural studies showed that results obtained in
western samples cannot just be generalized to the
Japanese context.
For instance, Scholz et al. [39] showed the validity of
generalized self-efficacy, the belief of being able to control
challenging environmental demands by taking adaptive
action [16], applied in samples drawn from 25
different countries. However, they also showed that the
mean scores of the general self-efficacy scale differed systematically
among countries. The lowest means were
found for the Japanese, followed by the Hong Kong Chinese;
whereas highest values were found for the Costa
Ricans, Danes, and French. They explained the low scores
of self-efficacy among the Japanese as follows: “hard work
and effort is more highly valued than ability in collectivistic
cultures. Therefore, self-efficacy may be rated lower in
collectivistic cultures than in individualistic cultures”.