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Gender Differences in Attitudes Towards Work Group in the United States and Japan *
Author(s) -
Fujimoto Tetsushi
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
international journal of japanese sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.133
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1475-6781
pISSN - 0918-7545
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-6781.1995.tb00030.x
Subject(s) - embeddedness , assertion , work (physics) , psychology , social psychology , gender role , demographic economics , gender studies , sociology , mechanical engineering , anthropology , computer science , engineering , economics , programming language
This study examines gender differences in employees' group orientations on the basis of the United States‐Japan gender comparisons of individual work attitudes. It is hypothesized that the gender differences in work group orientations disappear when workplace structures and styles of supervision are held constant across individual employees in the U.S. and Japan. The results show that the impact of being a woman on work group orientations is relatively small in both countries. At least, the impact of gender on Japanese and American group attitudes does not appear to be powerful enough to reinforce the assertion that gender is an absolute determinant of work attitudes. Although gender‐based arguments can not be fully rejected by the present results, the fact that one is a woman produced only a minimal increment in employees' work group orientations, when men and women worked in similarly structured organizations. The findings, however, indicate that gender differences in work group orientations are not thoroughly reducible to the fact that workplaces are differently structured for the two genders in Japan and the U.S. The possibility of cultural embeddedness of individual affective work orientations is discussed.