University students in Poland and the United States, two countries that differ in individualistic-collectivistic orientation, indicated their willingness to comply with a request to participate without pay in a marketing survey. Half were asked to do so after considering information regarding their own history of compliance with such requests, whereas the other half were asked to do so after considering information regarding their peers’ history of such compliance. This was designed to assess the impact of two social influence principles (commitment/consistency and social proof, respectively) on participants’ decisions. As expected, although both principles were influential across cultures, the commitment/consistency principle had greater impact on Americans, whereas the social proof principle had greater impact on Poles. Additional analyses indicated that this effect was due principally, but not entirely, to participants’ personal individualistic-collectivistic orientations rather than to the dominant individualistic-collectivistic orientation of their cultures.

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Resistance to the traditional gender role expectation for modest self-presentation among women was examined in a pair of studies. In the first-which included U. S. and Polish college students of both sexes-making traditional gender role expectations explicitly salient led to a significant reversal of traditional modest responding only among American women. A second study supported a role rejection account of this finding by demonstrating that (a) U.S. women reacted much more negatively to the traditional gender role expectations for modesty than did comparable men, and (b) those women who reacted most negatively also evidenced the greatest role-inconsistent intentions. The possibility is discussed that seemingly ambivalent role behavior may not be a result of role conflict but instead to the presence or absence of salient role-related stimuli.

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In 2 countries differing on individualistic–collectivistic orientation, we investigated resistance to a request made by a manager perceived as lacking personal power based on a key attribute (e.g., expertise, relationality). Results of an experiment with Polish and American participants were consistent with cultural differences in the preferred attribute of leaders in the 2 nations. Participants were more resistant to a manager who lacked the attribute more valued in their culture: Americans were more resistant to managers perceived as lacking in expertise, whereas Poles were more resistant to managers perceived as lacking in relational skills. This effect occurred only under conditions of well‐established workplace relationships, suggesting that group connectedness creates a tendency to behave in line with predominant cultural norms.