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INTRODUCTION
Linking culture to behavior in organizations is one of the distinctive features of the field of international management (see Devinney, Pedersen, & Tihanyi, 2010), and the importance of understanding the effect of cultural differences on management behavior has never been greater. As organizations increasingly face a knowledge-based competitive environment (Doz, Santos, & Williamson, 2001), the human aspect of management becomes ever more important. And, as the forces of globalization and migration patterns influence the world of work, the need to interact effectively with individuals who are culturally different, either face-to-face or through electronic media, is critical. Therefore the ability to assess variation in the capability of individuals to function across cultural contexts and with culturally different others is fundamental to furthering our understanding of the influence of culture on business operations.
Much has been learned from early anthropological study of culture (e.g., Geertz, 1973; Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck, 1961; Mead, 1937) and from large-scale studies of cultural values (e.g., Hofstede, 1980; House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004; Schwartz, 1992) about how societies are similar and different. However, this latter set of studies has been criticized for an overreliance on values (Earley, 2006; Kirkman, Lowe, & Gibson, 2006) and alternatives such as social axioms (Bond et al., 2004) or sources of guidance (Smith & Peterson, 1988; Smith, Peterson, & Schwartz, 2002) have been proposed. These recent efforts overcome the problem of thinking of culture as simply a set of values by recognizing that culture is the set of learned meanings maintained by a group of people (see Rohner, 1984). However, they do not do an adequate job of linking cultural context to behavior. Recent work, based in cognitive theory, provides the potential for integrated explanations of the processes that combine cognitive structures and societal context to understand action (see Peterson & Wood, 2008). As opposed to a reliance on cultural dimensions for explanations of culturally different behavior, cognitive theory suggests that cultural differences in the cognitive structures that drive behavior are made salient at different times (e.g., Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Benet-Martínez, 2000). This recognition opened the door to the idea that in addition to culture-specific knowledge a more general development of cognitive structures and processes might occur that could influence intercultural effectiveness. The construct...