Status,National Culture and Customers’ Propensity to Complain

People’s ability to express their voice in different situation is an important facet of their quality of life. This study examines the relationship between social status, cultural characteristics and customers’ voice behavior in multiple cultures. We hypothesized that social status would be positively related to customers’ voice expression. The cultural dimensions of power distance and uncertainty avoidance were expected to affect that behavior and to moderate the status–voicing relationship. Analysis of data concerning 8,479 customers from 12 countries showed that, as expected, customers with high status tended to register more service failures and to complain more frequently than customers of lower social status. All three social status distinctions explored in this study (gender, education, and age) correlated negatively with formal complaint, but only age correlated negatively with informal complaint. In addition, the two cultural dimensions had the expected negative effect on intention to complain, and moderated the relationship between social status and intention to complain. Theoretical contributions and applied implications are discussed.     

National Culture of Indulgence as Predictor of Prosocial Behavior: Governmental Effectiveness as Boundary Condition

Previous studies of national culture and prosocial behaviors have been limited to Hofstede’s five traditional culture dimensions. We introduce the fairly new and less studied cultural dimension of indulgence versus restraint (IVR) as a predictor of prosocial behaviors. We tested the effect of IVR on prosocial behavior over Hofstede’s previously studied dimensions. We also tested the moderating effect of government effectiveness on the relationship between indulgence and prosocial behavior. We crossed data for cultural dimensions from Hofstede with data from the world-giving index for prosocial behavior and data for government effectiveness from the World Bank. In total, eighty-seven countries entered our model. Indulgence predicted volunteering above the other researched cultural dimensions. It did not predict helping a stranger or donating. Among the cultural dimensions, only uncertainty avoidance was also significant in the prediction of volunteering. Uncertainty avoidance was the only cultural dimension that predicted donating. Individualism was not significant in the prediction of prosocial behaviors. Long-term orientation was the only cultural dimension that predicted helping a stranger (but not volunteering and donating) over other researched cultural dimensions. We found that government effectiveness is a boundary condition to the link between indulgent cultures and two prosocial behaviors (donating and helping a stranger but not for volunteering). Our results indicate that only in countries with high government effectiveness does indulgence predict prosocial behaviors, and not in cultures with low government effectiveness.