This paper presents a cross‐cultural comparison of Protestant work ethic characteristics of practising Protestant British and practising Muslim Turkish managers using Mirels and Garrett’s Protestant work ethic scale. Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic thesis is used as the conceptual framework in this study. The nature of the Protestant work ethic thesis and its relationship with organisation culture is discussed. Multivariate and univariate analysis of variance were used to analyse the data. The results suggest that there is a significant difference between practising Muslim Turkish managers and practising Protestant British managers: the Turkish group showed relatively higher Protestant work ethic scores than their Protestant counterparts. Possible reasons for the difference between British and Turkish groups are advanced in the light of Turkish economic, social and political developments. It is argued that representative Islamic sources also support the results of this research by pointing to the important role of a work ethic in Islam.

Emotional exhaustion, argued to be burnout's core dimension, can manifest itself as decreased productivity and job dissatisfaction. This study aims to determine how lack of reciprocity, lack of supervisory support, high workload, and work-family conflict affect emotional exhaustion. Data were collected from 295 physicians working at private and public hospitals in Antalya and İstanbul, Turkey. The survey included lack of reciprocity, supervisory support, workload, WFC items, and exhaustion subscale of Maslach Burnout Inventrory: General Survey (MBI:GS). The proposed model was tested using AMOS 17, which enables assessment of hypothesized relations and degree of fit between data and model. Workload and lack reciprocity were found to increase emotional exhaustion, while supervisory support alleviated the exhaustion physicians experienced. As expected, workload increased work-family conflict. Quite unexpectedly, workload was associated with lack of reciprocity; meaning, physicians more likely perceive their efforts go unappreciated and their patient relationships are inequitable (i.e. investing more than receiving) when they perceive a high workload. In addition, supervisory support was also associated with lack of reciprocity. Physicians experiencing inadequate supervisory support tend to describe their patient relationships in negative terms and perceive inequitable relations. Physicians who do not receive either adequate supervisory support or patient appreciation tend to feel emotionally exhausted. Moreover, both workload and work-family conflict increase physicians' exhaustion. Suggestions to reduce workload and social problems in hospitals are offered to reduce exhaustion.

ABSTRACT. The first aim of this paper was to investigate how the traditional Protestant work ethic (PWE) and more contemporary work values (i.e., masculine, feminine, and entrepreneurship values) were related to one another, and differed across genders and two cultural contexts, namely Turkey and the U.S. The second aim was to elucidate the role of religiosity in PWE among the two cultural groups. Two hundred and sixty six American and 211 Turkish university students participated in this questionnaire study. The analyses examining cross-cultural differences revealed that Turkish university students reported greater scores in the PWE and all contemporary work values as compared to their American counterparts. For the Turkish sample, there were no gender-related differences in the PWE, whereas in the U.S. sample, men reported greater PWE scores than did women. With regard to gender differences in contemporary work values, our results showed that gender groups differed in feminine and entrepreneurship values in both cultural contexts; men emphasized femininity and entrepreneurship more than women in Turkey but the reverse was true in the U.S. Correlations between contemporary work values and the PWE illustrated that the PWE is associated with entrepreneurship and masculine values in both cultural contexts and with feminine values in the Turkish context. Finally, our results regarding the role of religiosity in PWE indicated that highly religious participants reported greater PWE scores than the less religious ones regardless of culture. Findings are discussed with reference both to differences in the two socio-cultural contexts and to recent change in the social structure of Turkish society.

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