Work Values Across Cultures: The Role of Affect and Job Outcomes among Young Executives in Canada, Iran and Turkey

This volume is intended to shed light on the issues and challenges associated with lifestyle choices. Lifestyles are patterns of daily life, both within work and outside, characterised by the activities that one spends time on and includes other facets of one’s behaviour such as interactions and the implications of these for satisfaction, happiness and well being. The choices people make about how to use their time fundamentally affect the basic dimensions of their lifestyle, as increasing time spent on one activity decreases the time available for other activities. Such choices are likely to have profound implications for organisations in their attempt to attract and retain people and in their search for creating organisational contexts to cope with the changes in their environment, but also to develop their intellectual capital. In this sense, people’s work values, mood or affect at work, and the cultural norms within the organisation that guide and support such values, are likely to have an influence on the satisfaction they get from work, their work performance and their choices about ways of living. In addition, in today’s ‘flat world’ (Friedman, 2005) with the global and multi-cultural orientation of organisations, our intention in this chapter is to incorporate national culture in the analysis and examine whether work values, affect, and job satisfaction and performance, and their relationships, vary across cultures.