Testing Cultural Generality of Sources of Commitment to Multinational Enterprises

The globalization of American business has reactivated a long-standing debate over international exportability of American management theory and practice. This controversy prompted an investigation into factors binding foreign employees to an American multinational enterprise and the consistency of those effects across the firm’s culturally diverse subsidiaries. In a survey, 1,859 managers from 15 European and Canadian affiliates of a U.S. multinational firm described their organizational commitment and bases for that commitment-namely, job scope, role clarity, extrinsic rewards, and participative management. Applying structural equations modeling, we determined whether or not commitment sources similarly developed company attachment across offshore operations. Thefindings disclosed that these antecedents strongly predicted ommitment but displayed no meaningful cultural moderation. Implications for etiology of employee loyalty to global corporations are discussed. As American multinational enterprises (MNEs) set up operations worldwide and hire more local nationals, they increasingly confront the challenge of intercultural management (Gomez-Mejia & Welbourne, 1991; Hofstede & Bond, 1988; Reich, 1991). This development has spawned a debate: Should MNEs manage foreign employees according to their domestic practices? The controversy emerged as early as the 1960s (Gonzales & McMillan, 1961) and persists to this day (Black & Porter, 1991). One prevailing school of thought prescribes that MNEs should design new offshore subsidiaries as replicas of the parent company, presuming policies effective domestically will succee