may have stronger
ethical sensitivities because unethical or immoral behaviors
are believed to lead to group conflict and disrupt social
structures (Moon and Franke 2000). Managers in a highmasculinity
culture are expected to be decisive and assertive
rather than intuitive and consensus seeking. Such a culture
stresses equity, competition among colleagues, performance,
and resulting material success and progress. Therefore, it can
be argued that people from a masculine culture live to work
and tend to pursue success, even at the cost of sacrificing
marketing ethics if necessary. Along these lines, Vittel,
Nwachukwu, and Barnes (1993) propose an inverse relationship
between masculinity and conformity to professional,
industry, and organizational codes of ethics, and Yoo and
Donthu (2002) validate this. Masculine cultures also have
higher levels of corruption (Getz and Volkema 2001) and are
more likely to overlook ethically questionable business
practices.
From Hofstede’s (1991) study, we find that the United States
has a high masculinity index, or MAS, score of 62 (ranked 15
among 50 countries), and India has an MAS score of 56 (rank
20/21). Therefore, we expect that people from the United
States will exhibit a lower level of marketing ethical norms
than people from India. Thus:
Cultural Values on Marketing Ethical Norms 37
H3a: As a cultural dimension, masculinity negatively
influences the levels of marketing ethical norms in
each country.
H3b: In 英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】our study, India will have lower MAS scores
than the United States, and this will correspondingly
indicate higher levels of marketing ethical
norms in India.
In cultures with higher power distance, less powerful members
of an organization typically accept the unequal distribution
of power. This culture reflects a hierarchical organization
in which subordinates expect to be told what to do and
the ideal boss is a benevolent autocrat. These people are
more likely to obey their superiors than to follow informal
norms, such as industrywide codes of ethics (Vittel,
Nwachukwu, and Barnes 1993). Yoo and Donthu (2002) also
find that people with a larger power distance exhibit a lower
level of marketing ethics. Furthermore, cultures with large
power distance scores also have more informal leniency
toward rules of civil morality (Hofstede 2001) and a higher
degree of corruption (Getz and Volkema 2001), and they
claim unentitled benefits, bribes, and stolen merchandise
(Inglehart 2000). They respect formalization of authority and
prefer vertical top-down communication and, consequently,
pay less attention to their peers and informal norms, such as
ethical standards.
In a cross-cultural study, Lu, Rose, and Blodgett (1999) find
that Taiwanese people show lower scores in the marketing
norms they measured than Americans. Incidentally, Taiwan
has a high power distance index, or PDI, score of 58 (ranked
29/30 among 50 countries studied by Hofstede [1991]),
whereas
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