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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to integrate scholarship on personality, mentoring, developmental relationships, and social networks in delineating how employees with particular personality characteristics are more or less likely to be involved in four types of developmental networks.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reviews scholarship on personality characteristics and developmental relationships to identify a set of distinct personality characteristics proposed to be related to employees' tendencies to develop four types of developmental networks. These network types are defined based on high or low relationship strength and high or low relationship diversity in employee ties with others. We develop propositions delineating the nature of expected relationships of these personality characteristics with developmental network types.FindingsThe paper identifies five personality characteristics – interdependent/independent self‐construal, core self‐evaluations, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and extroversion/introversions – and explained how each should be related to employees' tendencies to develop the four types of developmental networks. These networks have been described as opportunistic, entrepreneurial, receptive, and traditional developmental networks, based upon the strength and the diversity of network relationships.Originality/valueThe paper suggests that personality variables are potentially valuable for understanding how individuals develop particular types of developmental relationships, an area that deserves more research attention. It is noted that developmental relationships have been shown to be related to both employees' objective career outcomes such as promotions and salary progress, and subjective outcomes such as career and job satisfaction.

Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are one of the most commonly referenced cultural models in the literature, but it has also been criticized for its inflexibility in terms of allowing for cultural changes over time. In this study, we focus on one salient dimension of national culture, long-term orientation (LTO), to investigate cultural change over time. Using the LTO scale developed by Bearden et al. ((2006) A measure of long-term orientation: development and validation. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 34(3): 456–67), we conducted a survey in Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and Turkey, and collected 1,452 valid responses. Our study provided new evidence on LTO national ranking and cultural change. We found the countries surveyed no longer appear to be in the same relative positions as when Hofstede first published his results in the 1980s, or his more recent results based on data from the World Value Survey (WVS). Implications for practitioners, academics, and students in the cross-cultural management field are discussed.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how individual interviewers’ dispositional cognitive motivations may influence interview interactions and outcomes. More specifically, this study explores the influence of the need for cognition, need for cognitive closure, and accountability on the relationship between first impressions and selection decisions. Design/methodology/approach In total, 41 graduate students were assigned the role of interviewers and were tasked to interview 331 undergraduate students at a large Midwestern university. The selection interview was designed to recruit qualified undergraduate students to the MBA program of the university. Findings First impressions significantly influenced selection decisions, but did not influence interviewers’ behaviors. Moreover, multilevel analyses reveal that interviewers’ need for cognition and accountability moderate the relationship between first impression and selection decisions, albeit in different direction. Need for cognition strengthens, whereas accountability weakens the relationship between first impression and selection decision. Research limitations/implications A potential interviewer bias is apparent, where interviewers high on need for cognition tend to weight first impressions more in the decision process. However, this bias was not directly observable, since interviewers’ behaviors during the interview were not affected by first impressions. Originality/value The present study goes beyond previous research on first impressions in the employment interview, finding that dispositional differences account for the tendency to weigh first impressions in the selection decision.