Do National Levels of Individualism and Internal Locus of Control Relate to Well-Being: An Ecological Level International Study

There has been increasing interest in cross-national research that attempts to understand differences and similarities among employees from different cultures and nations. One of the basic issues of concern to organizational researchers is the health and well-being of employees, and it has been viewed as both a response to the work environment and as an affect-related antecedent of other employee outcomes such as job performance or turnover. Employee control beliefs and perceptions have been linked to well-being and play an important role (Ganster and Fusilier, 1989; Spector, 1982). Although there is a tremendous amount of research at the individual level relating control and other variables to well-being, most has been done in the USA and a handful of western nations, and most has targeted the individual employee. Our study compared managers from 24 nations/territories at the ecological or sample mean level (Leung and Bond, 1989), as opposed to the individual participant level, in order to draw more definitive conclusions about nation differences.