I wanted a new challenge Cross-cultural differences in workers

It's not some generations ago that workers due to have a job for life, most probably one that followed in the footsteps of their father, and his father before that. In some of today's richer societies, it's all different. Longer education and greater individual choice integrated with mergers, take-overs and bankruptcies stingy that people's careers are typically punctuated by a series of crisp transitions or chapters. But how do people perceive these transitions and do much perceptions vary between cultures? To encounter out, Katharina Chudzikowski and her colleagues interviewed a mix of over a cardinal nurses and blue- and white-collar workers from five countries - Austria, Serbia, Spain, army and China.

Their stand-out finding? Workers in the United States didn't ever attribute a occupation transition to an external cause, much as conflict with a boss. Not once. Instead they tended to mention internal factors, much as their desire for a fresh challenge. By contrast, workers in China almost only stressed the role played by external factors. Meanwhile, workers in the the European nations were more of a mix, attributing their occupation transitions to both internal and external factors.

The researchers said a lot of the transitions reportable by the participants, especially in the army and Europe, were positive. Generally-speaking, people are known to be coloured towards attributing constructive events to themselves, and so it's perhaps little wonder that some workers attributed all these constructive occupation transitions to internal causes. \"In addition,\" the researchers said, \"in some cultures 'being in charge' of one's chronicle is positively valued. Conversely, reconstructing crucial occupation transitions as purely triggered by external circumstances does not convey a enthusiastic turn of competence.\"

Where workers showed a greater way to attribute their occupation transitions to external causes, this seemed to be related to the influence of a collectivist culture and an frugalness in flux. \"Countries with more impulsive economic change show a stronger emphasis on organisational and macro factors,\" the researchers said.

Apart from the value of its findings, the think also provides a multipurpose dissent of the difficulties involved in conducting cross-cultural research. For example, whilst interviews were conducted in the participants' native languages, the transcripts were translated into English for qualitative analysis, which upraised some interesting problems. For example, some German-speaking interviewees cited \"Wirtschaft\" as an influencing factor - a articulate that crapper stingy economy, industry, commerce or playing world, but which also has mythical-religious undertones. There's no real candid equivalent in English.

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Chudzikowski, K., Demel, B., Mayrhofer, W., Briscoe, J., Unite, J., Bogićević Milikić, B., Hall, D., Las Heras, M., Shen, Y., & Zikic, J. (2009). Career transitions and their causes: A country-comparative perspective Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.