Individualist

This criterion study examined the impact of the cultural dimensions of individualism and collectivism on actual plagiarism in working business students. Given globalization of business and recent business scandals, furthering our understanding of international ethics remains critical. Business students are the potential employees, managers and leaders of organizations in the future. In this study we focus on one form of unethical conduct by business students, i.e. actual plagiarism, and seek to determine the link between this behavior and cultural values of individualism/collectivism and associated stereotypes of Asian/Caucasian students. Our findings suggest that individualists plagiarize more than collectivists, and that no significant differences in plagiarism exist between Asian and Caucasian students, contrary to popular beliefs. The implications of these findings for scholars and managers are discussed.

The present paper is part of a larger study which comparatively examined the collaborative discourse of two Iranian and two Malaysian dyads. The members of the dyads were all female and of the same English language proficiency. Core findings of the study on the typology and the frequency of the pronouns used by the participants in the course of eleven sessions of collaborative writing are reported. The content analysis of their pair talk for pronouns indicated that Iranian participants tended to use “I” and “you” considerably more than their Malaysian counterparts, whereas Malaysian participants were found to have a stronger tendency to use “we” more often. The findings are discussed with regard to the macro-cultural dichotomy of world cultures (collectivist/ individualist).

This article describes research about horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism (HVIC) among African American and European American university students. The survey is based on the work of Harry Triandis (1995), one of the seminal researchers of individualism and collectivism (I-C). The survey of attitude and scenario items, developed by Harry Triandis (1995), was administered to undergraduate management students in three universities in the Eastern and Southeastern United States. Many of the attitude and scenario survey items directly address preferred communication patterns. The findings are also interpreted in terms of situational preferences about I-C, including the following contexts: social events, workplace decisions, and group and work dynamics. The research is unique in that it measures four types of the I-C dimension: horizontal individualism, vertical individualism, horizontal collectivism, and vertical collectivism, as conceptualized by Triandis (1995). Furth...