Personality, Organizational Culture, and Cooperation: Evidence from a Business Simulation

Abstract

We thank the Center for Creative Leadership, the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, and the University of California's Haas School of Business and Institute of Personality and Social Research for financial support; Dave Caldwell, Ben Hermalin, Chris McCusker, Barry O'Neill, Charles O'Reilly, Jeff Polzer, Brent Roberts, and Tom Tyler for comments on earlier drafts of this paper; and Rebecca Brown, Mary Cusack, Karen Etty Jehn, Kathy Mozier, Margaret Neale, Jeff Polzer, Barry Staw, and Jonathan Whitney for help with data collection or coding. We are especially grateful to Bob Sutton, three anonymous ASO reviewers, and Linda Pike for their editorial guidance. Deriving predictions from congruence theory, we explored the personal and situational sources of cooperation by contrasting behavior under conditions of personality fit and misfit with culture in an organizational simulation. We assessed MBA students' disposition to cooperate and randomly assigned them to simulated organizations that either emphasized collectivistic or individualistic cultural values. We found that cooperative subjects in collectivistic cultures were rated by coworkers as the most cooperative; they reported working with the greatest number of people, and they had the strongest preferences for evaluating work performance on the basis of contributions to teams rather than individual achievement. Results also showed that cooperative people were more responsive to the individualistic or collectivistic norms characterizing their organization's culture: They exhibited greater differences in their level of cooperative behavior across the two cultures than did individualistic people. We discuss the organizational implications of the conditions influencing behavioral expressions of personal cooperativeness.