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whistleblowing, Chinese culture, ethical organizational culture, positive affect,

Purpose -The current literature implicitly assumes a symmetric impact of cultural distance (CD) on expatriate adjustment. By using distance as a predictor of adjustment, the literature has rendered the direction of the flow irrelevant: a US expatriate in Germany is presumed to face the same hurdle as a German expatriate in the USA. Not only is there no evidence to justify that suggestion, but logic and related findings suggest just the opposite. The aim of the present paper is to test the proposition that such impact is asymmetric, that is, the impact of CD is contingent on the direction of the assignment. Design/methodology/approach -Using a two-flow sample of US expatriates in Germany and German expatriates in the USA, we examine and compare the psychological and socio-cultural adjustment of each group of executives. Findings -Controlling for the length of assignment, we find that German expatriates in the USA were better adjusted, both socio-culturally and psychologically, than American expatriates in Germany. These results support the asymmetry hypothesis and call into question previous findings attesting to the relationship between CD and expatriate adjustment. Originality/value -The paper offers new insights into the concept of CD and the findings may amount to a potentially fundamental contribution to the literature with important implications for the theory and practice of international human resource management.

Despite researchers’ increasing attention on customer sexual harassment, few studies have investigated its effects on the service performance of frontline employees. This study examined the link between customer sexual harassment, as perceived by frontline employees, and their service performance by focusing on the mediating role of difficulty in maintaining display rules and the moderating role of traditionality. The results from a field survey of 359 supervisor–subordinate dyads in a chain of restaurants in China provided evidence that difficulty in maintaining display rules mediates the negative relationship between customer sexual harassment and service performance. In addition, Chinese traditional values attenuate the relationship between customer sexual harassment and difficulty in maintaining display rules and the mediating effect of difficulty in maintaining display rules. Implications for theory, research and management practice are discussed.