Culture and the way of granting job autonomy: Goal or execution?

Abstract

Researchers have assumed that Westerners exercise higher job autonomy than Easterners. However, recent studies have reported mixed and even contradictory findings. The authors distinguish between two types of job autonomy, namely goal and execution autonomy, to examine the relevant cultural differences. The former denotes participation in setting work goals and making plans for meeting those goals, while the latter denotes the ability to complete tasks flexibly. Four studies with a total sample of 1192 participants working in financial or insurance companies were conducted. Study 1a generated items for a new measure of the two types of job autonomy and explored its factor structure. Studies 1b and 1c verified its construct validity and predictive capacity. Study 2 confirmed the structural and metric equivalence of the measure between samples from the United Kingdom and China. The results of Study 2 suggested that the Chinese workers were likely to have high execution autonomy but low goal autonomy, whereas the British workers tended to have high goal autonomy but low execution autonomy. The theoretical and practical implications of job autonomy in cross‐cultural contexts are discussed.