How much does job autonomy vary across countries and other extra-organizational contexts?

Abstract

1 This paper integrates the study of contextual influences on job autonomy as a key workplace practice with the growing literature on intra-country variation (ICV) versus between-country variation (BCV) in international HRM. While contexts such as industry or country are widely recognized to affect workplace practices such as job autonomy, the influences of different extra-organizational contexts are seldom examined simultaneously or their relative influence systematically compared. Similarly, while much research considers the importance of BCV vis-à-vis ICV in international HRM, little attention is paid to variation that occurs between sub-national or supranational contexts. To move forward on both these counts, we use multilevel analysis and empirically assess the comparative importance of industry as a sub-national context and politico-institutional clusters as a supranational context in addition to country context as sources of differences in job autonomy. Results indicate that inter-cluster variation can be substantially larger than inter-country variation, but that inter-industry dissimilarities tend to exceed both inter-cluster and inter-country dissimilarities. Hence, the main finding of our analysis is that dissimilarities in job autonomy associated with crossing country borders are not exceptionally large as employers and employees face larger dissimilarities in job autonomy when they move across industries.Implications of this finding both for international HRM and for international business and cross-cultural management more broadly are discussed. IntroductionWe consider differences in workplace practices, specifically job autonomy, across four hierarchical units of analysis, namely individuals (L1) that are nested in industries (L2) that are nested in countries (L3) that are nested in supranational clusters (L4). The backdrop to this analysis is a combination of two areas of research. The first of these concerns context as a source of differences in workplace practices such as job autonomy (Jackson, Schuler and Rivero 1989;Gooderham, Nordhaug and Ringdal 1999;Aycan et al. 2000;Von Glinow, Drost and Teagarden 2002). The second of these concerns the importance of within-or intracountry variation (ICV) vis-à-vis inter-or between-country variation (BCV), which is increasingly debated in international HRM ( . To do so, we rely on data from the well-known European Social Survey or ESS. This survey provides a unique data set, as it has collected questionnaire data on 3 workplace practices, specifically job autonomy, from nationally representative samples of respondents that cover 30 highly culturally and institutionally diverse countries as well as 62 two-digit industries (the complete industry division provided by Statistical Classification of Economic Activities developed by the statistical agency of the European Union, known as NACE codes). 3 As indicated, the specific workplace practice that we study is job autonomy, which refers to the degree to which a job "provides substantial freedom, independence...

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